Nyah, Nyah, you can't catch me

Rating: 8/10 (21 February 2006)

Catch Me If You Can should be seen back to back with Tony Curtis's performance in The Great Imposter. They are both excellent films and both deal with a protagonist who's a brilliant and charming fellow and a quick study who masquerades in many disguises.
In The Great Imposter the whole story is told from Tony Curtis's point of view. And it's more lighthearted in its treatment of Ferdinand Waldo Demara than this is of Frank Abagnale, Jr. Curtis's father Gary Merrill only has a few minutes in the beginning of The Great Imposter, but enough to establish the relationship there. Leonardo DiCaprio and Christopher Walken as son and father have a great deal more screen time together.
And of course in Catch Me If You Can we also have the point of view of the man trying to catch young Abegnale, FBI agent Tom Hanks. Remember this was the Sixties and J. Edgar Hoover was running the agency. Hanks is great as the uptight, buttondown agent in the Hoover mold. One of the best scenes in the film is DiCaprio conning Hanks out of an arrest by pretending to be a Secret Service Man and humiliating him in the process. He also turns Hanks into a man with a mission.
DiCaprio is a middle class kid from Westchester County whose father suffers some business reversals like Gary Merrill did in The Great Imposter. He refuses to accept a change in lifestyle and because he's bright, he develops into a master check forger. He masquerades as an airline pilot, a lawyer, and a doctor and steals millions of dollars and lives high on the hog. Another scene I like is DiCaprio entertaining a high class model at a five star hotel and then we cut to Hanks doing his laundry at some cheap laundromat.
Steven Spielberg allowed Walken to develop his father character a whole lot more than Gary Merrill did in The Great Imposter. This man for whom the American Dream became a nightmare got a deserved Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
The Great Imposter with its accent on entertaining never allowed Tony Curtis to develop Demara's character as DiCaprio did with Abegnale. Basically DiCaprio finds it easy to con people because people do want to believe the best in you. Ironically he develops a telephone relationship with his pursuer in the same way Curtis had with his parish priest, Karl Malden. The reason is simple, Hanks is the only guy who knows what makes him tick. And in the end Hanks is the guy who provides a useful outlet for DiCaprio's talents.
I like the way Spielberg developed his characters in this film. We get good three dimensional portrayals from DiCaprio, Hanks and Walken. It's a great film about another amazing adventure.