The Falcon and the Snowman

The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) is a Cold War spy drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director John Schlesinger drew two sharp, contrasting performances from Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn — playing the real Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee, who spent years handing CIA secrets to the Soviet Union.

Boyce landed his classified-documents job not through a security-vetted career path but through his father's connections. Inside the vault, he found evidence that the CIA had run covert operations against allied governments. That discovery broke his loyalty. His childhood friend Lee (Penn) was already deep in drug trafficking and saw the documents as a business proposition. Together they walked into the Soviet consulate in Mexico City and improvised their way toward an inevitable arrest.

Schlesinger keeps the film anchored in character rather than thriller mechanics, which is why it survives the period. Penn's Daulton Lee — fidgety, unreliable, genuinely unsettling — is one of his earliest roles that shows exactly what kind of actor he was becoming. Based on Robert Lindsey's 1979 non-fiction account of the actual Boyce-Lee case. Stream The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) on iFILM.