Rent The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)

Excellent 1974-set spy thriller based on a true story and a book - The Falcon and the Snowman review by PV

I was surprised I'd never seen this film - I knew the David Bowie theme tune though. With Pat Metheny jazz guitarist guy. It is based on a 1979 book about a true story.

This features Sea Penn playing a deeply arrogant & irritating character - so not much acting needed then LOL.

Timothy Hutton, the youngest winner of a best acting Oscar, for Ordinary People 1980, aged 20, stars - and is excellent. He was a massive star around late 70s and 80s, though seems one of those unrecognisable character actors now, not a film star.

The wonderful David Suchet stars as a sinister foreigner as he used to in his pre-Poirot days. He often played Russians, KGB spies, terrorists (as in The Professionals). And he does it so well.

Based on a true story of 2 posh American boys who sold secrets to USSR in 1970s for cash. The character Hutton plays, Christopher Boyce was released from prison on parole on 16 September 2002 after serving a little more than 25 years. The adopted son of a posh doctor Andrew Daulton Lee, a drug dealer who got at Boyce who worked for the government, also went to prison for life. But After 21 years of incarceration, Lee was released on parole in 1998.

Directed by posh, privileged, Jewish, openly-gay English film director John Schlesinger CBE who'd been a frontline cameraman in the forces in the Second World War, and who directed so many classic 1960s British films. A Kind of Loving (1962), Billy Liar (1963) and, in Hollywood, Midnight Cowboy (1969, Oscar winner), the brilliant Marathon Man (1976). One can see the gay and Jewish themes there.

He also returned to acting a bit, seen in a few TV films, The Lost Language of Cranes (1991). he directed John Major's Tory Party Political Broadcast in 1992, back in Brixton. Also the wonderful 1983 TV drama An Englishman Abroad.

4 stars