Scam artist

In Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale, the real-life con man whose exploits--posing as an airline pilot, an ER doctor, a lawyer and a college professor--had a nutty, playful, romantic quality. His highly enjoyable, hard-boiled memoir (written with Stan Redding), the source for Jeff Nathanson's screenplay, suggests that Abagnale was as much motivated by the theatrical and erotic satisfactions of his deceit as by financial gain.

Abagnale was high-school age when he began his illicit career in the early 1960s, passing as a series of men a decade older. The baby-faced DiCaprio, who can still play much younger than he is, is the perfect choice for the role of this risk-adoring, permanently turned-on scam artist. You can believe that he decides to pass as a pilot after glimpsing flyboys in their impeccably starched uniforms smiling down on their nubile groupies. When he romances a wide-eyed southern nurse (the charming Amy Adams), he has the blissed-out look of a kid whose private genie has just made his most fervent wish come true. DiCaprio's Frank is one lucky Lothario.

Beginning with an ingenious animated credits sequence designed by Kuntzel Deygas and wittily scored by John Williams, Catch Me If You Can presents itself as a cat-and-mouse comedy that matches Frank's quick-wittedness against the stick-to-it-iveness of a dogged, meticulous federal agent, Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), who hunts him down. It's the sort of material Alec Guinness might have starred in at Britain's Ealing Studios in the early '50s, in a breezy, disposable, 90-minute feature.