I have got some extremely sad news for people who loved Tom Hanks’ Carl Hanratty character in Catch Me If You Can<\/b>: the movie. And that includes me, too.<\/p>\n
\nCarl Hanratty does not<\/i> exist. There has never been a Carl Hanratty. No super-bumbling, antisocial cop who works on Christmas nights looking for Abagnale, with delicious knock-knock jokes for colleagues and superiors. Ergo, no guy who was fooled by Frankie-boy when he was about to arrest him. Hanratty was created entirely by Mr Steven Spielberg ( or whoever wrote that nice script) There is a brief mention of an Irish cop named Sean Riley, who is hot on his trail.<\/p>\n
Frank Abagnale does exist, though. And he’s a conman out and out. Remember his nice father, with his story of two mice who fell in a bucket of cream? Good news, that guy does not exist either. Abagnale had a father who fell out with the woman he married and later fell out with the IRS, but they never had anything to do with their son once he started off on his adventures. <\/p>\n
Remember Abagnale going inside the classroom and playing a teacher just for the heck of it? That line when he writes his name on the blackboard and says “My name’s Ab<\/i>agnale, not Abag<\/i>nale, not Abagnale<\/i>, just Ab<\/i>agnale.”? That didn’t happen either. He does<\/i> play a teacher, but not to get back at some jocks – he does it to earn some extra money, and he does it a lot later in life. In fact all his crimes, and he started off with conning Mobil people using his father’s credit card, has to do with earning money. He needs the money because he’s a womaniser and to his credit, he admits that he is one.<\/p>\n
The book is well-written. I think Stan Redding has to be thanked for it, for his collaboration with the Man. There are very good explanations of how the con-game is played, with an insightful, and often hilarious, look at an average Pilot, or a Stewardess ( stews<\/i> is what they are called) Abagnale is a nervy chap, and boy, do I envy his life!!! That bit about him hooking up with a callgirl and getting her<\/i> to pay him for the experience is true ( the scene in which she flings playing cards at him is not! :-), he did it by giving her a check for 1400 dollars, and asking for 400 dollars back, in cash. <\/p>\n
Then one time he gets arrested and has to stay the night in the prison, and the FBI are supposed to pick him up the next morning. Just when all hope is lost, a sleazy lawyer pops up and agrees to cough out the bail amount of 5000 dollars for the young pilot ( Well, everybody thinks<\/i> he is a young pilot, no? ) Frank, of course, writes him a cheque, and flies off to the other side of the country ( later, he does send a real cheque for the benevolent lawyer.<\/p>\n
Frank does get arrested, though. There’s nothing Hollywoodish about how he is tracked down, or how he gets arrested. Some Stewardess, an ex-girlfriend sees him in Montpellier and notes his car number down, and he gets arrested in a grocery shop. Sentenced to a year in a French prison. Warning to all: Never get arrested and tried in France. Even if you do get arrested, try to get extradited to Sweden. The Swedes believe in rehabilitation of criminals. The French believe in locking them up in a dungeon and letting them rot in the darkness. No, I am not getting confused with The Count of Monte Cristo<\/i>, I am talking about Catch Me If You Can<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I still can’t over the fact that the Hollywood Machine mutilates a real person’s life so much. Comic characters, I can take it, it’s all about interpretation. But a real person! Would I<\/i> like my life-history mutilated onscreen? Definitely not! Frank Abagnale has a brother and a sister, forgoshsakes! The movie makes him a single son. Driven to crime because of his father’s condition and the breakup of his family. A guy who thinks he can give it all up because he fell for a nurse and ends up telling her father who he really is, because he loves<\/i> her. Bull! The only time Frank fell for someone he wanted to marry, he felt relieved after she ratted about him to the police – because he realised he didn’t want to get hooked up.<\/p>\n
Just so they can say “Based on a true story”, they call it the story of Frank W Abagnale. They could have well made a normal story of a fictional conman. What crap! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have got some extremely sad news for people who loved Tom Hanks’ Carl Hanratty character in Catch Me If You Can: the movie. And that includes me, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}