I WAS A LUFTMENSCH FOR THE KGB

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201400006-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 19, 2012
• Sequence Number: 6
• Publication Date: February 4, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/19: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201400006-2
NEI% YORK
4 February 1985
Movies/David Denby
F WAS A LUFTMENSCH
FOR THE KGB
SEAN PENN, AN EDGY, HARD-DRIVING
daredevil, and Timothy Hutton, still too
earnest but at least a little better-looking
now that he's older, make an odd, affect-
ing pair of friends in The Falcon and the
Snowman--the story of Daulton Lee
(Penn) and Christopher Boyce (Hutton),
the real-life American traitors-who were
convicted in 1977 for selling secrets to
the Soviet Union. The movie has a lot
else going for it-a good plot, a suavely
mysterious look developed by cinema-
tographer Allen Daviau (E.T.), and direc-
tor John Schlesinger's precision with ac-
tors. Yet The Falcon and the Snowman is
finally frustrating. Does Schlesinger
know what his own movie is about? At
times, I thought he couldn't. Falcon has
too many loopholes, unanswered ques-
tions, moral muddles. By the end, I was
unable to tell if we were supposed to
think of the boys as American heroes or
American buffoons.
Adapting the 1979 book by New York
Times reporter Robert Lindsey, Steven
Zaillian has w; itten a kind of cryptic out-
line--plenty of action but no more than
cramped, mysterious hints of character
and motivation. As Zaillian and Schles-
inger tell the story, . Christopher and
Daulton, former altar boys from upper-
middle-class families in Southern Cali-
fornia, had absorbed very different things
from the counterculture atmosphere of
the sixties and early seventies. Chris-
topher, a dropout from studies for the
priesthood, was an idealistic, morally se-
rious kid, troubled by the war in Viet-
nam, Watergate, and CIA destabilization
of the Allende regime in Chile. Daulton,
on the other hand, had fallen right
through the bottom. A hustling, conniv-
ing drug dealer, he was always. in trou-
ble, always lying, running away, resur-
facing, running again, forever moving to
the next deal. According to Lindsey, the
boys liked to get stoned together, and
they shared a passion for the aristocratic
sport of falconry, training the sleek,
predatory birds in the California hills.
Zaillian and Schlesinger have confined
the falconry kick to Christopher, Daul-
ton, we gather, doesn't have enough
class for that sort of thing. In scene after
scene, Christopher is out in the hills, em-
bracing the mystic brotherhood of the
bird (or something like that-the scenes
are magisterial but opaque). And much
of the comradeship has been . dropped
out-it is now a very awkward and un-
likely friendship between a high-minded
rebel and a crass but rather lovable
hustler.
Christopher's dad (Pat Hingle), a gruff-
ly disapproving ex-FBI man, uses the old-
boy network to get him a job at an elec-
tronics plant with a CIA contract. After
only minimal security checks, Chris-
topher Boyce, a college dropout, only 21
years old, winds up handling the coded
messages coming in from the agency's
spy satellites. (Is this possible? Apparent-
make any sense: Timothy Hutton plays
him as an intelligent, morally righteous
young man who draws power, despite
some moments of panic, from his certi-
tude. This is a highly honorable boy who
makes a naive mistake.
But how can Schlesinger and Zaillian
set him up as a principled natf when he
trades secrets for money? The actual
Christopher Boyce, serving time for his
deeds, wrote huffy, bristling "intellec-
tual" letters to the judge in his case; later
on, he escaped and became a bank rob-
ber. If this complex and devious person-
Birds of a feather: Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton in John Schlesinger's film.
ly it was.) Shocked by what he sees--evi-
dence that the CIA was involved, among
other things, in defeating Gough Whit-
lam's Labour government in Australia-
he decides to sell the satellite codes to
the Soviet Union.
Or at least that's- the way the movie
tells it. He is outraged; he wants to
rebel against his father and his country;
he decides to take action. But what can
possibly be in his head? That's what the
movie doesn't tell. us. If Christopher was
repelled by CIA tricks, what did he imag-
ine the KGB was up to? And if he was
outraged by what the CIA had done in
Australia, why didn't he just make the
secrets available to the Australians? Was
he stupid, uninformed, out of it? The char-
acter, as presented in the movie, doesn't
ality-possibly a genuine outlaw type,
like Jack Henry Abbott-was an idealist,
he was the, kind of idealist who throws
bombs. The filmmakers took the easy
way out by making him an innocent
American victim-a boy who wanders in
over his head. _
The filmmakers don't answer any of
our questions; they press ahead with
their story, which is at least partly defen-
sible, since it's a good story. Christopher
may not make much sense, but Daulton
Lee certainly does: Trapped by the po-
lice, he had to get out of the country, and
so he became Christopher's courier-
espionage is just a continuation of his ca-
reer as a drug dealer. As Daulton, Sean
Penn wears a tiny mustache that seems
on the verge of sliding off his face (it sur-
.C 74'r D
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/19: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201400006-2
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/19: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201400006-2
passes in awfulness Robert De Niro's
pencil-line atrocity in The Kung of Com-
edy-it's truly the saddest mustache I've
ever seen), and he speaks in the small,
squeaky voice of an adolescent braving
the rocks of puberty. When his Daulton
makes contact in Mexico City with an ex-
tremely suave KGB agent (David Su-
chet), the movie breaks into comedy.
This tiny little punk treats the Russians
as if they were cheap hustlers just like
himself. He doesn't have any ideas, any
emotions about what he's doing-he's in
it for the cash, and, pocketing the KGB's
money, he's as excited as a teenager
scoring for the first time.
Daulton is hilariously inadequate as a
spy, yet the performance never comes
near spoof-Penn stays inside the des-
peration of this cagey, sly, often foolish
young man, who complains that the Rus-
sians won't pay for a decent hotel and
wails with dismay when they drive off
from a nighttime rendezvous, leaving
him without a ride home. By doing the
espionage scenes as comedy, Schlesinger
gets us on the boys' side; their exploits
feel like a triumph of youthful American
ingenuity-like Bell and Watson invent-
ing the telephone-and, laughing at our-
selves, we root for them.
Undersize, desperate to impress, Daul-
ton operates with an undercurrent of fear
that his glory might all be taken away. So
he keeps titanipulating, maneuvering,
trying things out, and, as Christopher
abandons him, Penn's voice rises even
higher and cracks. Daulton is Schles-
inger's richest character since Dustin
Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo, in Midnight Cow-
boy (1969), another self-propelled loser
who won't give up. Like that film, Falcon
is about the friendship between an at-
tractive man and a lifetime misfit.
There's something about that connection
that brings out Schlesinger's humanity-
a quality conspicuously lacking in such
freezingly contemptuous films as Mar-
athon Man, The Day of the Locust, and
Honky Tonk Freeway.
Schlesinger moves along fast, cutting
back and forth between Mexico and Cali-
fornia, jerking characters around the
map. The speed, the triumph over geog-
raphy are cinematic all right; however,
the sudden shifts make an exciting but
not very convincing movie. How, for in-
stance, does the fugitive Daulton cross
the border so many times without trou-
ble? Falcon is both fast and dreamy-
suddenly it will stop dead fora falcon rev-
erie. I confess I never really understood
the point of these scenes; nor am I im-
pressed by the menacing eye of a stuffed
owl that Schlesinger keeps zeroing in on.
Ah, the mysterious eye of a bird! What
does it portend, that dark, glittering fire
of bird consciousness? What indeed?
Swathed in such empty, inexpressive
flourishes, the movie finally suffocates
from vagueness.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/19: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201400006-2