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Lincoln's dictum sits on a blackboard, Pascal's goes unmentioned ("tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne pas savoir demeurer en repos dans une chambre"). A remembrance en route to jail, the compulsive trickster (Tony Curtis) snared at last, a New England schoolteacher is his latest impersonation. He drops out of high school but turns U.S. Marine with forged credentials, his dud Dad (Gary Merrill) was a movie projectionist. A new identity is launched in a new location whenever the threat of discovery looms, Trappist abbot (Raymond Massey), Southern warden (Arthur O'Connell) and Navy captain (Edmond O'Brien) are among the father figures collected along the way. "I'm not gonna let you sell me Freud." A string of picaresque pirouettes on the impostor inverosímil, as Borges would have it, ideal for Robert Mulligan's calm way with an absurd yarn. The protagonist's appetites curtail his monastery stay but help with the seduction of the Canadian Navy nurse (Joan Blackman), at the penitentiary his displacement draws him to a volatile convict (Mike Kellin). A priest from childhood (Karl Malden) plays his confessor throughout, "the most difficult part of growing up is learning to be realistic." Schizophrenia extends to the tone, one moment there's cross-eyed Doodles Weaver offering a jug of moonshine and O'Brien petrified by an overdose of Novocaine, the next there's a knife fight behind bars and Korean refugees awaiting surgery aboard a warship. Zoom transitions in a world of "nothin' but mahoneys and finks," the perfect void at its center is Curtis with a sly understanding of the pretender's thespian side. The companion film is Mulligan's own The Other, a different register for a boy in fanciful, entrapping flight. With Jeanette Nolan, Sue Ane Langdon, Frank Gorshin, Robert Middleton, and Dick Sargent. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |