Catch Me If You Can (Dreamworks Pictures, Kemp Company, Splendid Pictures, Parkes/MacDonald Image Nation, Amblin Entertainment, Muse Entertainment Enterprises, Kennedy/Marshall Company, 2002)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (June 6) at 10 p.m. Turner Classic Movies showed a film my husband Charles and I could have seen together in a theatre when it first came out, but didn’t: Catch Me If You Can (2002), Steven Spielberg’s quite engaging true-life story of Frank W. Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), who in the seven years between 1963 and 1969 successfully scammed Pan American Airways and various hospitals and law firms of millions of dollars before he was finally tracked down and arrested – whereupon the government, acting on the to-catch-a-thief principle, gave him a sweetheart deal and allowed him to leave prison early in exchange for his becoming an FBI operative helping to uncover and track down schemes like the ones in which he’d participated. Abagnale was directly involved in this movie in several ways: the film was based on an autobiography he co-wrote with Stan Redding, he was credited as “consultant,” and he’s even in the movie in a bit part as a French policeman who assists FBI special agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) in busting him in Marseilles, France in 1969. TCM showed this as part of a regular series they’re doing every Friday night in June of films about con artists, and the June 6 screening followed A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan’s and Budd Schulberg’s masterpiece about a no-talent hick who gets elevated into major stardom and political influence – sound familiar?) and Elmer Gantry (a 1960 movie I first saw in 1972 after I had read Sinclair Lewis’s novel, which disappointed me because the film only dramatized the middle third of the book and I kept waiting and hoping they’d make a sequel with Burt Lancaster repeating the role; in that part Gantry rises above his faith-healer revival-tent origins and becomes pastor of an influential big-city mainstream church).

At first I thought Catch Me If You Can was paced too slowly, but it soon caught a groove. In fact, for me (at least) it caught a groove even before the film itself started; Spielberg tried to make it look as much as possible like a film from the 1960’s and to do that he brought in animator Lee Lennox to do a dazzling opening credits sequence much like the ones Saul Bass did in plenty of 1950’s and 1960’s classics. Charles was in the kitchen getting himself a snack when the credits flashed on (he often makes fun of my insistence on watching opening credits sequences) and I actually called him to the living room because I thought he should have a chance to see them. When the film opens Frank Abagnale, Jr. is growing up in New Rochelle, New Jersey (which fans of the Dick Van Dyke Show will recall as the suburb in which his and Mary Tyler Moore’s characters lived). His father, Frank Abagnale, Sr. (Christopher Walken), met his mother Paula (Nathalie Baye) in Montrichard, France while he was serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. When the film opens Frank, Sr. is serving as a well-respected official in the local Rotary Club but he’s also being investigated for tax fraud by the Internal Revenue Service. In addition he’s pulling petty grifts like borrowing a white Cadillac from a local auto dealer, ostensibly for a test drive but really to make a “splash” in New York City by having his son pose as his chauffeur and hold the passenger door open for him once they park. When the family is forced to move to a different neighborhood and Frank, Jr. has to change high schools, he insists on wearing the blazer from his old school to the new one, and he gets bullied. He gets his revenge on his bully by striding into his high-school French class and posing as a substitute teacher. (We presume he learned French at home from his French mom.) We get the point quickly: Frank’s dad has taught him to have a blasé attitude towards the law and the normal rules and regulations of society, and Frank, Jr. is going to ramp that up and work his way up to truly big cons. Frank, Jr.’s life really goes off the rails when his parents break up, and given a choice as to which one he should live with, he chooses neither and runs away instead.

He scores a Pan American Airways uniform and, by posing as a reporter for his high-school newspaper, interviews a Pan Am executive for information on how a co-pilot is supposed to behave. With this imposture, he’s able to travel as so-called “deadwood” – a service airlines offer each other’s personnel to get them to the destinations from which they’re supposed to fly out again. He also starts forging paychecks, getting official Pan Am logos from soaking off the decals off model planes (there’s a grimly amusing scene of him having first one such model in his bathtub, then a whole slew of them) and cashing them at airport banks. Later he forges a medical-school diploma from Harvard and uses that to talk his way into a job as an emergency-room doctor on the night shift even though all he knows about practicing medicine has come from watching doctor shows on TV. Along the way he has various sexual encounters, including one with a woman whom he declares is the best date he’s ever had and another who’s a high-end hooker. She’s holding a deck of cards, and every time he quotes a price for a night with her, she says, “Go fish,” and tosses one of the cards to the floor – until he bids up to $1,000 and she agrees. He pays her with a forged $1,400 paycheck he makes over to her and gets her to reimburse him $400 in cash. Having already successfully posed as an airline pilot and a doctor, Frank, Jr. then settles in New Orleans because his latest girlfriend, Brenda Strong (a young Amy Adams), has a family there. Brenda met Frank when she was a volunteer nurse at the hospital at which he was posing as a doctor, and he seduced her by giving her a gold-plated necklace (he seems to have a large supply of these things, and his modus operandi with them is to hand them to the woman he’s after and say, “You must have dropped this”). When they first meet she’s wearing braces, but later she gets them removed. Brenda tells Frank that her family disowned her when she got pregnant and had a secret and illegal abortion, and Frank immediately offers to marry her and go to her home town, New Orleans, to get her parents to take her back and agree to let him marry her.

When Frank learns that Brenda’s dad is local prosecutor Roger Strong (Martin Sheen), he decides to impress him by passing himself off as someone with dual graduate degrees in medicine and law and announcing that he’s going to resume his legal career. Dad gives him a job in his prosecutor’s office even though, as with doctoring, all Frank knows about lawyering is what he’s seen on TV. He copies Raymond Burr’s approach as Perry Mason and goes full-tilt even at a preliminary hearing with only himself and a very exasperated judge present. While all this is going on, Carl Hanratty (reportedly a composite character made up by screenwriter Jeff Nathanson out of several FBI agents involved in the manhunt for Frank, Jr.) has been tracking Frank, Jr. across the country and the trail of bad checks he’s left behind him. He gets a clue from an unlikely source; he’s having lunch at a restaurant when a teenage waiter (Jeremy Howard) sees the name “Barry Alden” listed repeatedly on a document showing how a person using that name has cashed a long series of bad checks in various locations. The waiter tells Hanratty that “Barry Alden” is the alter identity of the comic-book superhero The Flash, and from that Hanratty deduces that his elusive prey is a teenager because that’s (or at least it was) the main audience for comic books. Nathanson makes Hanratty a Captain Ahab character with Frank, Jr. as his Moby Dick; it’s probably the least sympathetic performance of Tom Hanks’s career until he played Col. Tom Parker in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic. Hanratty is so relentlessly humorless that, when his FBI colleagues challenge him to tell a joke, he says, “Knock knock.” When they answer, “Who’s there?,” he says, “Go fuck yourselves.” (He only gets to complete this routine once in the film because one of the quirkier rules of the motion picture ratings board is if you say the “F”-word more than once, you get an NC-17 rating automatically.)

Acting more like a comic-book villain than a rationally self-preserving con artist, Frank, Jr. makes it a point of calling Hanratty every Christmas Eve and taunting him. At one point Hanratty traces Frank’s father – by then his mom has remarried to one of Frank’s old Rotary friends and the two have had a daughter – who tries to cover up for his son by denying any knowledge of his whereabouts. But Hanratty notices a letter addressed to Frank, Sr. from a return address in Atlanta and traces him there, only to lose him again. When Hanratty and his men show up at his wedding reception for Brenda, Frank, Jr. shows her suitcases full of cash and tries to get her to flee the country with him, but naïve little Brenda is too stunned to react either way. Ultimately Hanratty traces Frank, Jr. to his mother’s home town, Montrichard, France (which really exists, by the way), because he’s figured out that Frank’s fake checks are coming from a professional-grade printing press which is hidden somewhere in plain sight. When Hanratty gets a list of the locations of presses like that in Europe and Montrichard is on it, he figures the most logical place for it to be is Frank’s mother’s old home town. Hanratty shows up there and insists he’s going to arrest Frank and there are 12 French police officers outside to support him. Frank thinks Hanratty is bluffing, and he comes outside expecting to see no one – and suddenly a squad of French police drive up in their Citroëns (a 1950’s version of a space-age vehicle and one of the oddest-looking cars ever built). Hanratty takes Frank into custody and announces they’re going to fly back to the U.S. together. As the plane is about to descend and a group of nervous flight attendants tell Hanratty and his fellow agents that they need to take their seats so the plane can land, Frank goes into the plane’s restroom and manages to pry the toilet loose from its moorings (it’s only plastic anyway) so he can crawl out under the plane’s landing wheels and make an escape attempt. Ultimately he’s nailed, after a poignant scene in which he goes to his mother’s and stepfather’s home on Christmas Eve and watches his half-sister through the big picture window but doesn’t dare try to make contact with her. But as I mentioned at the outset, as with a lot of more recent computer hackers, the FBI cuts a deal with Frank, Jr. for his help in nailing other criminals who are trying to pull the same scams he did.

I remember seeing two promotional TV interviews about this film when it was in theatres; one was with Frank Abagnale, Jr. himself warning people how to avoid computer scams, and the other was with composer John Williams. In scoring this film, Williams avoided the sort of big, symphonic score he’d written for the Superman and Star Wars films, as well as their myriad sequelae, and instead went back to his roots in 1950’s big-band jazz. The film also makes a quite effective use of source music, including Judy Garland’s 1940’s record of George Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” (Billie Holiday’s version, also from the 1940’s, remains definitive, but the Abagnales aren’t the sorts of people who would have been listening to Billie Holiday in the early 1960’s); the Stan Getz/João Gilberto/Astrud Gilberto “The Girl from Ipanema” (played, natch, while Frank is hobnobbing with various nubile young women in an Atlanta swimming pool); and quite a few other inspired choices. Spielberg’s determination to make something that looked like a 1960’s film also inspired his cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski. Unlike all too many color films these days in which everything is so drenched in dank, dirty greens and browns one wonders why, if they’re going to use so little of the visible spectrum, they don’t just go ahead and shoot in black-and-white, Kaminski’s work here is actually colorful. It’s drenched in bright pastels that emphasize both the beauty and the ultimate phoniness of the world Frank Abagnale, Jr. has created for himself. It’s also worth noting that the last name is pronounced “Aaaah-bag-nail,” since both Sr. and Jr. are quite impatient with anyone who tries to show off by reverting to its original Italian pronunciation.

Among other things, Catch Me If You Can is a testimonial to the era before personal computers and the Internet, in which identity theft was still a relatively rare crime because in order to impersonate another person, you literally had to forge physical documents saying you were that person. You couldn’t just hack into a database from a remote location and set up a phony personal file and online presence like you can now. (That's the real point made by those laborious scenes in which Frank, Jr. painstakingly soaks the decals off from the models of Pan Am's jets so his fake paychecks from them will have the correct logo.) Ironically, Leonardo DiCaprio made a virtual remake of this movie 11 years later in The Wolf of Wall Street (reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-wolf-of-wall-street-red.html), in which he also played a real-life con artist (corrupt stockbroker Jordan Belfort) who scammed a lot of people before he finally got his comeuppance. That film was directed by Martin Scorsese from a script by Terence Winter, and was also based on an autobiography by DiCaprio’s character, but somehow Scorsese and Winter missed the kind of artful balance between making us root for their con artist and wanting to see him get caught that Spielberg and Nathanson nailed beautifully. What’s more, Jordan Belfort targeted ordinary people who in some cases entrusted their life savings to him and his corrupt brokerage, while Frank Abagnale, Jr. went almost exclusively after deep-pocketed corporations which could relatively easily absorb what he was stealing from them.