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Steven Spielberg’s new picture is this year’s equivalent of Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven.” In that case a director who’d achieved recognition for relatively serious work, most notably “Traffic,” opted to remake a lighthearted caper movie from the 1960s. Now the world’s most successful director takes a break from a recent string of heavier fare, but this time not via one more Indiana Jones adventure or dinosaur epic; instead he offers a tale that hearkens back to another early-sixties piece, Robert Mulligan’s “The Great Impostor” (1961). That movie starred Tony Curtis as Ferdinand Demara, who successfully masqueraded in a variety of professions; “Catch Me If You Can,” also based on the experiences of a real person, traces the career of Frank Abagnale Jr., a New York youngster who, some forty years ago, posed as a pilot, a lawyer and a doctor while cashing more than two million dollars of fraudulent checks throughout the country and the world. It’s basically a glib but bouncy bit of sixties-style slickness in which the hero might wind up caught but the audience gets pure escapism; like Soderbergh’s picture it makes few intellectual demands and takes absolutely no chances but is supremely well-crafted and quite easy to take.

It also tries to cover virtually every base to appeal to the broadest slice of today’s moviegoing public. Older viewers will be delighted by the sprightly but old-fashioned tale of a lovable rogue relentlessly pursued by a single-minded cop who over time develops a paternalistic interest in his quarry. They’ll also like the fact that the picture is relentlessly clean–the closest it comes to the risque is a gag involving a greedy call-girl (in this context, even the word “prostitute” seems too harsh). They’ll enjoy the witty title sequence by Kuntzel+Deygas, which recalls the classic work of Saul Bass, and the references to TV Land-style television like “Perry Mason,” “Dr. Kildare” and “To Tell the Truth.” If they’re of a certain age and gender, they’ll probably smile at the memory of a Silver Age comic book like “The Flash.” And they’ll undoubtedly be attracted by the presence of Tom Hanks, the most unthreatening of today’s superstars, who gets to look paunchy and affect a raspy, nasal drone as Carl Hanratty, the workaholic FBI agent in traditional black suit and ultra-thin tie. Hanks isn’t really right for the role (it’s amusing to speculate who might have played it in an earlier era–maybe Glenn Ford or Jack Lemmon), but he certainly works hard at seeming to enjoy it.

On the other hand, in order to make the film palatable to the younger crowd, which might find the narrative too retrograde for their taste, Spielberg puts Leonardo DiCaprio center-stage as Abagnale. The “Titanic” heartthrob is really too old for the part: the kid performed his feats of chicanery between the ages of 16 and 21, while Leo was a relatively musty 27 when the picture was shot. But in fact he pulls it off wonderfully well. In the earliest scenes, before the legal problems of Abagnale’s father and his parents’ divorce cause the kid to run away to an eventual life of crime, Leo manages to be a convincing teen, even in an episode when the character, transferred to a new school, pretends to be a substitute teacher and fools everybody in an early example of his role-playing dexterity. Throughout the picture DiCaprio brings a disarming charm to Abagnale, making the character ingratiating rather than smug; it’s a matinee idol turn rather than a performance to put beside his early work in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” or “A Boy’s Life,” but it’s far preferable to his other more recent appearances, including “Gangs of New York.” The only other cast member who matches him is Christopher Walken as Abagnale Sr., the smooth but unsuccessful (and decidedly self-absorbed) con artist dad whom junior longs to impress but never quite does. Walken suggests depths in the senior Abagnale beyond what Jeff Nathanson’s script reveals; it’s a pity the narrative doesn’t use him more effectively. (The suggestion that Frank is driven to his activities by an adolescent need to reunite his divorced parents is a serious undercurrent to the tale that isn’t fully developed.) The rest of the cast are stuck in caricature roles, and play them that way; even Martin Sheen can’t do much as the father of a Southern belle (Amy Adams) whom young Frank nearly weds.

There are further problems with “Catch Me If You Can.” We’re never shown how Frank acquires his forgery expertise; going into this aspect of his development might have slowed things down a bit, but leaving it unexplained increases the implausibility level. At 140 minutes, moreover, the picture goes on too long; the last act, in which Carl springs Frank from prison to become a part of the FBI fraud unit, loses impetus, however necessary it might seem to round things off. John Williams’ score never manages to match the best sixties examples of musical whimsy (think Henry Mancini). Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography doesn’t successfully replicate the bright, glossy look of the pictures it’s trying to emulate. And if you’re going to start the film by depicting the beginning of Frank’s appearance on “To Tell the Truth,” it’s a bit of a cheat not to return at the end and disclose whether he was unmasked.

Nonetheless Spielberg’s picture is a mostly enjoyable throwback to an earlier cinematic era, a tribute which doesn’t quite equal its models but is still reasonably engaging. It’s a trifle, but an amusing one; and it gives DiCaprio the opportunity to shine in the sort of star vehicle that’s pretty rare on the ground nowadays.

Perhaps it’s a matter of inexplicable cultural differences. This new version of the nineteenth- century classic by Carlo Collodi, co-written and directed by Roberto Benigni, who also stars as the puppet that wants to be a real boy, is, with a budget of some $45 million, the most expensive film ever made in Italy (though one suspects that some of Mussolini’s follies–like the 1937 “Scipio Africanus”–might actually have cost more in contemporary terms). It’s also been hugely successful there–indeed, it broke all Italian box-office records when it opened in October, and hauled in over $25 million in ticket sales by the end of November. Now it makes its appearance in the U.S., in a dubbed version offered as a Christmas release; and to tell you the truth, if Miramax wanted to choose a holiday to open “Pinocchio,” Halloween would have been far more appropriate. In the current season, it’s like a cinematic stocking stuffed with lumps of coal; but with its innumerable sequences of its bug-eyed, frenzied fifty-year old auteur prancing about in clown garb, arms flailing, pretending to be a rambunctious child (shades of Martin Short’s 1994 clunker “Clifford”), the gaudy, chaotic movie proves far creepier than any of the horror flicks that studios brought out last October, and its constant preoccupation with death gives it a truly morbid tone. In every sense of the word, the picture is just frightful: it will either terrify children or bore them to tears, and adults will be rightly appalled by it. That the Italian public embraced it so readily can only be explained by Benigni’s cult of celebrity there (indeed, the critics were at best lukewarm in their assessments, so perhaps the cultural chasm isn’t so great after all).

The story is far too familiar, especially from Walt Disney’s much-loved 1940 effort, to require more than the most cursory recollection, but this version hews more closely to Collodi’s original than that animated classic did. Gepetto (Carlo Guiffre), an elderly carpenter, fashions a puppet boy from an enchanted log to stand in for the son he’d always wanted, and to his amazement the entity walks and talks. He intends Pinocchio, as he calls his creation, to go to school and become an upstanding citizen, but the puppet is torn between his desire to become human–something that will require his learning to be responsible and honest–and his childish longing for immediate gratification (shades of Freud). Though advised by the Blue Fairy (Nicoletta Braschi) and an officious talking cricket (Peppe Barra) to choose the right path, Pinocchio constantly gets into trouble instead, as a result either of his innocent gullibility (as when he’s taken in by the sly Fox and Cat–Max Cavallari and Bruno Arena, or nearly eaten by a giant puppeteer–Franco Javarone) or of his natural inclination to fun (as when he pairs up with the rebellious Leonardo, played by Kim Rossi Stuart). His antics ruin Gepetto, even sending the poor old codger into the belly of a whale, Jonah-style, but eventually Pinocchio learns his lesson and earns his transformation.

Given the nature of the beast, it’s understandable that “Pinocchio” is episodic, but it certainly wasn’t necessary for it to seem so ramshackle and illogical as it does here. There’s no rhyme or reason to the order of events or the appearances and reappearances of characters, nor is there any dramatic (or comic) arc to the puppet’s growth; he doesn’t appear to learn anything, and his conversion seems just an abrupt wrap-up. (The rather incoherent quality of the U.S. release is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that it appears to have been whittled down by fifteen minutes or so from the 108-minute Italian cut, but nobody is likely to complain of the missing footage.) The laughs are exceedingly few, unless one finds Benigni’s relentless Jerry Lewis-style high jinks amusing (surely this embarrassment will cause Hollywood to rue the dreadful error it made in awarding him the Best Actor Oscar for 1997); and despite the fact that some characters actually die (Leonardo expires in the form of the donkey he’s turned into, for instance), it has virtually no poignancy to it. No one in the cast is particularly memorable; the most personable work probably comes from Stuart as the unlucky Leonardo. Braschi (Benigni’s wife, and one of the producers) is especially dull as the Blue Fairy, though Guiffre runs her a close second as a persuasively decrepit Gepetto. Barra suffers from the misfortune of having to play a fairy-tale character in unflattering makeup; the result is rather akin to the dreary effect wrought by such Hollywood disasters as the MGM “Alice in Wonderland” from 1933. The production design and costumes of the late Danilo Donatti are colorful, and Dante Spinotti’s cinematography often elegant– together they result in some bewitching fairytale backgrounds–but the “special effects” are mostly hokey (perhaps their old-fashioned tackiness is meant to be charming–if so, it fails to achieve its purpose), and they can’t make up for the utter lack of charm in the film. The dubbing doesn’t help things: the voice cast includes Brekin Meyer as Pinocchio (he manages to match Benigni’s excesses on the vocal side), as well as such big names as Jim Belushi, John Cleese, Glenn Close, Topher Grace, Eddie Griffin, Eric Idle, Kevin James, Queen Latifah, and even–Lord help us–Cheech Martin and Regis Philbin. But the result is still awful, with a hollow sonic ambiance and mismatched lip movements that add to the surrealistic incongruity of it all.

We can leave the last word on Benigni’s folly to Barra’s cricket–no jiminy here–who has the most memorable line when he despairs of locating Pinocchio in the maze of what’s here called Funforeverland. “My heavens,” the sage old insect says. “It’s a nightmare.” Uh-huh.