The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)

This  movie is about what film critic Roger Ebert once described as "one of the most peculiar cases of treason in American history." It is the story of two California men, friends since they were alter boys together, who in the mid-1970's kind of accidently on purpose end up selling state secrets to the Russians. Timothy Hutton is Christopher John Boyce, a seminary drop out and oldest son of a former FBI agent who gets a job working for a government contractor receiving and transmitting coded top secret communiques from U.S. intelligence assets around the world. Boyce becomes disillusioned when he learns of how the U.S. government covertly assisted in the political demise of an inconvenient Australian prime minister who was deemed insufficiently aligned with American interests. Disgusted at the behavior of his own government, and feeling that simply leaking information to a newspaper would be of only very limited effectiveness, Boyce enlists the aid of his friend Andrew Daulton Lee (Sean Penn) a modestly successful drug dealer, in finding an outlet for the intelligence information to which he has access. Lee eventually does so by selling it to the Soviet Union through their Mexico City embassy, Boyce is at first repelled by this but eventually decides to go along.

The title of the films comes from the name of the 1979 book The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage by Robert Lindsey on which the movie is based, Boyce being "The Falcon" because of his pet falcon Fawkes and Lee "The Snowman" because he was a drug dealer, and as depicted in the film liked his cocaine more then just a little bit. Boyce and Lee of course both eventually get caught and they each go to prison for a long time, though Boyce actually escapes for a while and that story sounds like it could have made a decent sequel to The Falcon and The Snowman. Strong performances from Hutton and Penn, as well as Pat Hingle  as Boyce's father and David Suchet as the two's Soviet handler, are all ably guided under John Schlesinger's expert direction resulting in a film that is sharp, moody and morally ambiguous. An impressive work and sadly a somewhat forgotten one.  ***1/2