''The Falcon and the Snowman'' is a 1985 American
spy
Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangib ...
drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been ...
film directed by
John Schlesinger
John Richard Schlesinger (; 16 February 1926 – 25 July 2003) was an English film and stage director. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for ''Midnight Cowboy'', and was nominated for the same award for two other films ('' Darling'' an ...
. The screenplay by
Steven Zaillian
Steven Ernest Bernard Zaillian (born January 30, 1953) is an American screenwriter, film director and producer. He won an Academy Awards, Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a BAFTA Award for his screenplay ''Schindler's List'' (1993) and has ...
is based on the 1979 book ''The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage'' by
Robert Lindsey, and tells the true story of two young American men,
Christopher Boyce
Christopher John Boyce (born 16 February 1953) is a former American defense industry employee who was convicted of selling United States spy satellite secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
Early life
Boyce is the son of Noreen Boyce (née H ...
(
Timothy Hutton
Timothy Tarquin Hutton (born August 16, 1960) is an American actor and film director. He is the youngest recipient of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, which he won at age 20 for his performance as Conrad Jarrett in ''Ordinary People ...
) and
Andrew Daulton Lee
Andrew Daulton Lee (January 3, 1952) is a former drug dealer who was convicted of espionage for his involvement in the Cold War spying activities of his childhood friend, Christopher Boyce.
Lee was the adopted eldest son of Dr. Daulton Lee, a wea ...
(
Sean Penn
Sean Justin Penn (born August 17, 1960) is an American actor and film director. He has won two Academy Awards, for his roles in the mystery drama ''Mystic River'' (2003) and the biopic ''Milk'' (2008).
Penn began his acting career in televisi ...
), who sold US security secrets to the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
. The film features the song "
This Is Not America
"This Is Not America" is a song by English singer David Bowie and American jazz fusion band Pat Metheny Group, taken from the soundtrack to the 1985 film ''The Falcon and the Snowman''. It was released as a single in February 1985, reaching numb ...
," written and performed by
David Bowie
David Robert Jones (8 January 194710 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie ( ), was an English singer-songwriter and actor. A leading figure in the music industry, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the ...
and the
Pat Metheny Group
The Pat Metheny Group was an American jazz band founded in 1977. The core members of the group were guitarist, composer and bandleader Pat Metheny; and keyboardist and composer Lyle Mays, who was in the group at its inception. Other long-standing ...
.
Plot
Christopher Boyce, an expert in the sport of
falconry
Falconry is the hunting of wild animals in their natural state and habitat by means of a trained bird of prey. Small animals are hunted; squirrels and rabbits often fall prey to these birds. Two traditional terms are used to describe a person ...
and the son of a former FBI special agent, gets a job at a civilian defense contractor working in the so-called "Black Vault," a secure communication facility through which flows information on some of the most classified U.S. operations in the world. Boyce becomes disillusioned with the U.S. government through his new position, especially after reading a misrouted communiqué dealing with the
CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...
's plan to
depose the Prime Minister of Australia. Frustrated by this duplicity, Boyce decides to repay his government by passing classified secrets to the Soviets.
Andrew Daulton Lee is a drug addict and minor cocaine smuggler, nicknamed "The Snowman," who has frustrated and alienated his family. Lee agrees to contact and deal with the KGB's agents in Mexico on Boyce's behalf, motivated not by idealism but by what he perceives as an opportunity to make money with plans to settle in Costa Rica, a nation that at that time had no extradition treaty with the United States.
As the pair become increasingly involved with espionage, Lee's ambition to create a major espionage business coupled with his excessive drug use begins to strain the two from each other. Alex, their Soviet handler, becomes increasingly reluctant to deal through Lee as the middleman because of Lee's periods of irrationality. Above all, Boyce wants to end the espionage act so that he can resume a normal life with his girlfriend Lana and attend college. Boyce meets with Lee's KGB handler to explain the situation. Meanwhile, Lee is desperate to regain the Soviets' regard after realizing that the KGB no longer needs him as a courier. Lee is observed tossing a note over the fence at the Soviet embassy in
Mexico City
Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital and largest city of Mexico, and the most populous city in North America. One of the world's alpha cities, it is located in the Valley o ...
and is arrested by Mexican police and a U.S. Foreign Service officer accompanies him to the police station.
When the police search his pockets and find film from a
Minox
Minox (pronounced ) is a manufacturer of cameras, known especially for its subminiature camera.
The first product to carry the Minox name was a subminiature camera, conceived in 1922, and finally invented and produced in 1936, by Baltic German ...
camera Boyce used to photograph documents along with a postcard used by the Soviets to show Lee the location of a drop zone, they produce pictures of the same location that was on the postcard, showing officers surrounding a dead man on the street. The Foreign Service officer explains that the Mexican police are trying to implicate him with the murder of a policeman. The police then drag Lee away and interrogate him.
Hours later, Lee reveals that he is a
Soviet spy
The KGB (russian: links=no, lit=Committee for State Security, Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), a=ru-KGB.ogg, p=kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ, Komitet gosud ...
. Told by the Mexican police that he will be deported, Lee is offered a choice of where to be sent. Lee suggests Costa Rica, but the choice is merely between the Soviet Union and the United States. Lee reluctantly agrees to go back to America and is arrested as he walks across the border.
Knowing that he too will soon be captured, Boyce releases his pet falcon, Fawkes, and then sits down to wait. Moments later, U.S. Marshals and FBI agents surround and capture him. As the film ends, Lee and Boyce are seen being escorted to prison.
Cast
Critical reception
''The Falcon and The Snowman'' received generally positive notices upon release in 1985 and currently has an 82% on
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
from 22 critics.
Film critic
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...
gave it a perfect four-star rating, citing one of the many strengths as that "it succeeds, in an admirably matter-of-fact way, in showing us exactly how these two young men got in way over their heads. This is a movie about spies, but it is not a thriller in any routine sense of the word. It's just the meticulously observant record of how naiveté, inexperience, misplaced idealism and greed led to one of the most peculiar cases of treason in American history."
Film critic
Gene Siskel
Eugene Kal Siskel (January 26, 1946 – February 20, 1999) was an American film critic and journalist for the ''Chicago Tribune''. Along with colleague Roger Ebert, he hosted a series of movie review programs on television from 1975 until his d ...
of the ''
Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television ar ...
'' also gave the film four stars and hailed Hutton and Penn's work in the film, writing that "it's tough to spot Penn in this new role" and calling Penn's performance rare because it "neither patronizes nor celebrates drug use; instead, it's absolutely lifelike, and for a film based on a true story, there is no greater compliment." Siskel also noted that the two lead characters formed an odd couple that made "a terrific formula for a movie, creating at least three stories: The plight of each man, their joint effort to accomplish their goal and the changing dynamic of their relationship as the story progresses. As if that weren't enough, 'The Falcon and the Snowman' also turns into a 'how-to' movie with a fine sense of detail for the worlds of espionage and drugs."
Captain Midnight intrusion
On April 27, 1986, a broadcast of ''The Falcon and The Snowman'' by
HBO
Home Box Office (HBO) is an American premium television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is ba ...
was interrupted for four and a half minutes by a pirate broadcast featuring a message protesting the network's introduction of signal scrambling and higher charges for satellite dish owners. The incident made national headlines;
the hijacker, electrical engineer John R. MacDougall, was eventually arrested and fined $5,000.
Music
References
External links
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''Lucy'' the Peregrine Falcon used in the movie.
Movie stills
{{DEFAULTSORT:Falcon And The Snowman, The
1980s spy drama films
1985 crime drama films
1985 films
American crime drama films
American spy drama films
Cold War spy films
American docudrama films
Fictional duos
Films directed by John Schlesinger
Films set in Mexico
Films set in Mexico City
Films set in the 1970s
Films with screenplays by Steven Zaillian
Orion Pictures films
Spy films based on actual events
1980s English-language films
1980s American films