The Great Impostor (1960)

Director: Robert Mulligan
Writer: Liam O’Brien, based on the book by Robert Crichton
Stars: Tony Curtis, Edmond O'Brien, Arthur O'Connell, Gary Merrill, Joan Blackman, Raymond Massey, Robert Middleton and Karl Malden

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Like many, I thoroughly enjoyed Catch Me If You Can, the 2002 movie with Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio. It was fiction but based on the true story of a ballsy conman called Frank Abagnale, Jr. who became different people to get what he wanted. Well, partly true, because many doubts have been cast on the veracity of his claims and I can see why. Some of them do seem to have been borrowed from this film.

This is another true story about a different ballsy conman who became different people, a man called Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been debunked and yet it came first by half a century. Tony Curtis plays Demara, and he’s called him his favourite role from a long and distinguished career.

While Abagnale did what he did for money, Demara seems to have done what he did for a much better reason: to help people. Well, that and because he simply can’t grasp why anyone has to settle for less than they’re worth, just to comply with society’s rules. He learns that as a child when his father loses his small chain of movie theatres then is hired back as a simple projectionist. It isn’t right, he thinks.

It certainly doesn’t seem right that he lose out on officer school because he didn’t finish high school. He scored the highest marks in all the tests, even though he was up against a set of college graduates. But, you know, rules. So he decides to work around them.

To do that, he starts forging documents and suddenly he has an instant commission in the Marines. Except that he learns that the FBI has to check the paperwork, so he fakes his death, gains an PhD and joins a contemplative order of monks. He’s eventually caught and sent to a disciplinary barracks, where he interviews the warden for a newspaper and, pretending to be him with all that background knowledge, gets a job in a prison, becoming the deputy warden and running maximum security.

We’re actually not far into the movie at this point, but you see where it’s going. It’s a gift of a role for Curtis and I presume it’s lightened a little from the book—and the reality—to cater to Curtis’s comedic talents. Some Like It Hot was a year earlier. However, Spartacus was earlier the same year and there’s some serious drama here too.

The scenes in maximum security are serious and tense, as he attempts to get the inmates to open up to help, given that they’re scared and lashing out, resisting authority out of instinct. Mike Kellin’s role as primary prisoner Clifford Thompson is so serious and hard hitting that it seems unreal to be found within a comedy.

I’m not sure if the fight between Curtis and Kellin is the most serious moment in the film or whether that comes when Demara becomes a doctor in the Canadian Royal Navy having to operate on nineteen Koreans in one night on a moving ship. It’s pure drama that’s only offset by the pure comedy of his first task on board the Cayuga, to remove the captain’s bad tooth.

While the script does often throw Demara in at the deep end like this and he dives into the nearest book to figure things out, what it fails to tell us is that Demara was able to succeed in these various jobs not just through sheer balls but by having an eidetic memory. It seems like that’s an important detail, as shifting from the dentistry incident to the nineteen operations stretches belief otherwise.

It’s good drama after he’s rumbled and faces a court martial to find that many of the people he had conned are still oddly on his side. The warden says he was the best deputy he’s ever had. Everyone on Haven Island wants him to return as their teacher. Even the nurse who he falls madly in love with in Canada still wants to marry him. However, we do wonder why he was so damn good at all these wildly different jobs until we research Demara afterwards and learn that crucial detail.

Perhaps the biggest difference between this film and Catch Me If You Can is that Curtis is the focal point throughout. There’s no Tom Hanks chasing him for most of the movie to build the tension. When he’s caught, it’s typically due to circumstance, like Frank Gorshin showing up at the prison after knowing him in barracks or his heroics in Korea making the front pages.

That gives Curtis huge opportunities, along with the fact that Demara the only consistent character. Almost everybody else is stuck in a single segment of story or, in the case of Karl Malden as Father Devlin, a brief spot in a few of them. It’s therefore Curtis’s show, playing a character who’s playing many others, not just Fred Demara but Martin Goddard, Dr. Robert Gilbert, Ben W. Stone, Dr. Joseph C. Mornay or even Sgt. Wilkerson of the State Police.

Of course, Curtis was seriously in demand in 1960, after films like Sweet Smell of Success, The Defiant Ones and Some Like It Hot. He was in five films released that year, the most since the six in each of 1949 and 1950, his first two years in film, as Anthony Curtis, if he had a credit.

He was born Bernard Schwartz in New York to poor Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His mother was schizophrenic and his father died when he was twelve. He and his brother spent a month in an orphanage when they couldn’t afford to feed them.

He reached Hollywood in 1948 after a couple of years in the Navy on a supply submarine in the Pacific and a couple more studying acting, having been discovered at college by David O. Selznick’s niece, Joyce. A string of small roles followed before growing fan mail prompted a starring role, 1951’s The Prince Who Was a Thief, and he became established.

When he co-starred in Houdini in 1953 with Janet Leigh, they had been married two years; she was the first of his six wives and mother to two of his six children, actresses Jamie Lee and Kelly. He met his second wife on Taras Bulba in 1962, by which point he was a star.

He was primarily known for comedy, with a string of classics to his name, like Some Like It Hot, Operation Petticoat and The Great Race, plus the TV adventure show The Persuaders, but he was award nominated for serious dramas like Sweet Smell of Success, The Defiant Ones and The Boston Strangler. His final role was for David & Fatima, a 2008 retelling of Romeo and Juliet with a Jewish man and a Palestinian woman.

Outside acting, he was an avid painter and helped finance restoration of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Hungary. He died in 2010 at 85, leaving 60 years of work behind him.