VEILED THREATS by Phil Mershon
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      • This Film is Not Yet Rated
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      • That Championship Season
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      • Capote
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      • Seven Psychopaths
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      • The Deer Hunter
      • Let the Right One In
      • Colour Me Kubrick
      • A Time to Kill
      • A Scanner Darkly
      • Salem's Lot
      • Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired
      • The Seven-Ups
      • The Contender
      • Hoffa
      • The Pledge
      • American: The Bill Hicks Story
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  • Before the Deluge
    • The Bicycle Thief
    • Judgment at Nuremberg
    • Five Minutes to Live
    • The Manchurian Candidate
    • Hud
    • Pressure Point
    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
    • Jean-Luc Godard >
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      • Masculine Feminine
      • Film Socialisme
    • Brian De Palma >
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      • Take the Money and Run
      • Bananas
      • Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But were Afraid to Ask
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      • Annie Hall
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      • Manhattan
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      • Zelig
      • Broadway Danny Rose
      • The Purple Rose of Cairo
      • Hannah and Her Sisters
      • Radio Days
    • Robert Altman >
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      • Ready to Wear
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      • The Player
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      • Duel
    • Oliver Stone >
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    • Orson Welles >
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      • DODES'KA-DEN
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    • Costa-Gavras >
      • The Confession
      • Missing
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      • Spellbound
      • Shadow of a Doubt
      • The Birds
      • I Confess
      • Dial M for Murder
      • Rear Window
      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
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THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN
You may have heard that Sean Penn is the greatest actor of his generation. Even though we witness most of the movie through the senses of Timothy Hutton's character, nothing you see in The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) will undermine that assessment of Mr. Penn.
   Penn plays Daulton Lee, an upper-middle class drug dealer (cocaine and heroin are the substances of choice), former altar boy, and best friend of Christopher Boyce (Hutton), a recent escapee from the seminary, bird-of-prey fancier, and malcontent regarding matters of popular politics. Nixon is facing impeachment proceedings, driving Chris' retired FBI father crazy, and the junior Boyce finds himself more than a little disgusted with the treachery of the President and what he represents. 
   In short, The Falcon and the Snowman is a buddy film of a particular type, the most obvious comparison being director John Schlesinger's earlier film, Midnight Cowboy. 
   Chris and Daulton share a past that should be wider than their future. But being the King of the Cosmos, the Future does not care how things are supposed to be. 
  Somewhere along the line, Daulton began to disappoint his family. Eventually he breaks their hearts, calcified as those hearts have become. Chris, of course, has always been the golden boy, and when his father gets him a job with a defense security company that occasionally receives misdirected telex messages from the CIA, no one is terribly surprised, despite his pet falcon being named after Guy Fawkes. 
   The world of defense security takes Chris by surprise. Margaritas are the drink of the day, no one takes their job with high degrees of seriousness, and after-work debauchery is the order of the day. Cynical and detached, Boyce acclimates without much effort, until one day a pesky telex message alerts him to CIA influence in Australian elections. "Here we go again," Hutton's face says, and in a flash we recall Salvador Allende, The Shah of Iran, Guatemala, The Bay of Pigs, and hundreds of other Central Intelligence leisure activities. Rather than allow himself to implode from apathy, Boyce shares what he has learned with his old pal Daulton. The drug dealer has run afoul of federal agencies and has no interest in serving serious prison time. The idea gets floated to sell the secrets Chris has unearthed to the Soviets. Daulton thinks of himself as a world-class negotiator, someone who can push the Russians around, as the need should arise, so he offers to go to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City to make the deal.
   The Russians immediately suspect Daulton of being too sloppy to be the brains behind the operation. But Penn's character has learned to survive in spite of his own deficiencies and we find ourselves impressed with his bumbling savoir faire. Schlesinger gives us a marvelous scene where Penn sits with two Soviet spy-coordinators with whom the "negotiator" is growing increasingly impatient as the latter two fret over minor details. Frustrated with their old-world ways, Daulton interrupts to inquire if the two men would be interested in expanding the operation to include some heroin trafficking. 
   The Russians' response, if there was one, went unreported.
   After a few successful exchanges of cash for intelligence, Chris and Daulton decide to shoot for a big pay-off. The Russians, exhausted with the amateurish nature of the boys' behavior, allow Daulton to get arrested by Mexican authorities who, after a rather unpleasant interrogation, offer to transport the young man to either the Soviet Union or the United States. "I'm an American," the self-proclaimed Republican spy replies. 
   Penn's performance moves beyond believability into something far more important to the artistic success of a motion picture. He sits right next to you in the theater, chomping popcorn, slurping your soda, and tapping your shoulder to find out what you think of every performance in the movie except his own. Almost anyone with the proper amount of good training, work experience and self confidence can become a competent actor. Sean Penn, on the contrary, gives every indication of being consumed with self-doubt every step of the way. And this is all to his benefit. If you remember the scene of W. Bush sitting in the classroom reading the goat book to school kids when his aid whispers into his ear that the United States is under attack, the muted reaction on the President's face comes as close as anything I have ever seen to matching the credibility of Penn's performance in this movie. This man really is as good as it gets.
      To tell further details of the story is to wreck more than the plot line. If you want more information than the movie itself reveals, you can also read the excellent book by Robert Lindsey. Boyce himself (released in 2000) wrote a memoir called American Sons. While perhaps not as well-written as Lindsey's story, it still makes for a fascinating look into the minds of two kids who, for very different reasons, descended into a madness not entirely of their own making. 
   It remains a minor ironic footnote that upon his release from prison in 1998, the real-life Daulton Lee accepted an offer to work for Penn as the latter's personal assistant. ​
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  • Home
  • Links
  • The Deluge
    • Veiled Threats >
      • 1939-1945
      • 1946-1963
      • 1964-1975
      • 1976-1985
      • Born Losers
      • Don't Look Back
      • Bonnie and Clyde
      • Cool Hand Luke
      • The Graduate
      • Up Tight!
      • Cycle Savages
      • Wild in the Streets
      • Never a Dull Moment
      • Yellow Submarine
      • Night of the Living Dead
      • Faces
      • The Love Bug
      • Midnight Cowboy
      • Easy Rider
      • Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
      • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
      • They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
      • The Magic Christian
      • Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
      • The Landlord
      • The Ballad of Cable Hogue
      • Getting Straight
      • The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
      • Five Easy Pieces
      • Godard in America
      • Gimme Shelter
      • Little Big Man
      • The Boys in the Band
      • Joe
      • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
      • The Big Boss
      • There's a Girl in my Soup
      • The Liberation of L B Jones
      • Klute
      • The French Connection
      • Willie Dynamite
      • Helter Skelter
      • King: A Filmed Record
      • Get Carter
      • Harold and Maude
      • Panic in Needle Park
      • Across 110th Street
      • And Soon the Darkness
      • Deliverance
      • Rolling Thunder
      • Super Fly
      • Busting
      • The Ruling Class
      • The Harder They Come
      • Day of the Jackal
      • Play Misty For Me
      • The Jezebels
      • Sacco & Vanzetti
      • Badlands
      • Cold Turkey
      • Soldier Blue
      • American Graffiti
      • The Falcon and the Snowman
      • Watership Down
      • Scarecrow
      • Walking Tall
      • Frances
      • The Coca-Cola Kid
      • Bob Roberts
      • Bad Company
      • We Are Marshall
      • Patton
      • The Natural
      • The Crossing Guard
      • Reds
      • The Spook Who Sat by the Door
      • Mud
      • Who is Harry Nilsson
      • Ornette: Made in America
      • Six Degrees of Separation
      • This Film is Not Yet Rated
      • Incident at Oglala
      • That Championship Season
      • The Pope of Greenwich Village
      • Little Murders
      • Assault on Precinct 13
      • Capote
      • Inglourious Basterds
      • The Friends of Eddie Coyle
      • Scorpio
      • The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
      • A New Leaf
      • Seven Psychopaths
      • The Last House on the Left
      • The Deer Hunter
      • Let the Right One In
      • Colour Me Kubrick
      • A Time to Kill
      • A Scanner Darkly
      • Salem's Lot
      • Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired
      • The Seven-Ups
      • The Contender
      • Hoffa
      • The Pledge
      • American: The Bill Hicks Story
      • Donnie Brasco
      • Bugsy
      • Milk
      • Reservoir Dogs
      • Glengarry Glen Ross
      • V for Vendetta
      • Trumbo
      • Two in the Wave
      • South of the Border
      • Into the Abyss
      • God Bless America
  • Before the Deluge
    • The Bicycle Thief
    • Judgment at Nuremberg
    • Five Minutes to Live
    • The Manchurian Candidate
    • Hud
    • Pressure Point
    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
    • Jean-Luc Godard >
      • Breathless
      • Masculine Feminine
      • Film Socialisme
    • Brian De Palma >
      • Sisters
      • The Fury
    • Stanley Kubrick >
      • Lolita
      • 2001: A Space Odyssey
      • A Clockwork Orange
      • The Shining
      • Full Metal Jacket
    • Francis Coppola >
      • The Conversation
      • Apocalypse Now
    • Woody Allen >
      • Take the Money and Run
      • Bananas
      • Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But were Afraid to Ask
      • Sleeper
      • Love and Death
      • Annie Hall
      • Interiors
      • Manhattan
      • Stardust Memories
      • Zelig
      • Broadway Danny Rose
      • The Purple Rose of Cairo
      • Hannah and Her Sisters
      • Radio Days
    • Robert Altman >
      • M*A*S*H
      • Brewster McCloud
      • 3 Women
      • Nashville
      • The Gingerbread Man
      • Ready to Wear
      • Gosford Park
      • The Player
    • Luis Bunuel >
      • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    • Roman Polanski >
      • Cul-de-Sac
      • Rosemary's Baby
      • MacBeth
      • The Tenant
    • Martin Scorsese >
      • Boxcar Bertha
    • Steven Spielberg >
      • Duel
    • Oliver Stone >
      • Talk Radio
    • Orson Welles >
      • F For Fake
    • Akira Kurosawa >
      • DODES'KA-DEN
    • Max Ophuls
    • John Ford >
      • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    • John Huston
    • Frank Capra
    • Billy Wilder
    • Roger Corman
    • Bernardo Bertolucci
    • Elia Kazan
    • William Wyler
    • Spike Lee
    • Francois Truffaut >
      • 400 Blows
      • Jules and Jim
      • Bed and Board
    • Jean Renoir
    • Federico Fellini
    • Charlie Chaplin
    • John Cassavetes
    • Agnes Vargas
    • Alain Resnais
    • Eric Rohmer >
      • Claire's Knee
    • Ida Lupino
    • Leni Riefenstahl
    • Penny Marshall
    • Costa-Gavras >
      • The Confession
      • Missing
    • Alfred Hitchcock >
      • Spellbound
      • Shadow of a Doubt
      • The Birds
      • I Confess
      • Dial M for Murder
      • Rear Window
      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
  • Links