Making A Dishonest Living

Rating: 9/10 (28 December 2002)

Once again, director Steven Spielberg pulls another one of his patented surprises with CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, a juicy crime caper film set in the 1960s and based on the exploits of Frank Abagnale Jr., a young man who ran away from home and went on a three-year spree of check forgery amounting to over $4 million. Leonardo DiCaprio portrays Abagnale, who managed to impersonate a pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, and pretty much every other legitimate line of work to make himself rich before FBI agent Carl Hanratty finally caught up with him.
As played by the always-reliable Tom Hanks, Hanratty is a dedicated and cunning foil for DiCaprio's con-man Abagnale. The two men find themselves locked into a deliciously suspenseful game of cat and mouse that frequently resembles Hitchcock's great caper films of the 50s. The main titles sequence is priceless in its own right (if one didn't know better, one would swear this film had actually been made in the early 1960s), and John Williams concots a jazzy score redolent of Henry Mancini's classic 60s film scores. Featuring co-starring turns by Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, and Jennifer Garner, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is yet another triumph for Spielberg, one of the greatest directing geniuses in Hollywood history.