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Saturday, August 30, 2025

THE JUGGLER (1953)

The first thing you need to know about this Holocaust survivor film is that it’s not about a Clown in a Concentration Camp.  (It’s about a Clown out of a Concentration Camp.)  The second thing you need to know is that it’s not half bad.  Last in a series of small, important sounding flops Stanley Kramer produced under a sweetheart deal @ Harry Cohn’s Columbia, many with cleansed ‘Hollywood Ten’ helmer Edward Dmytryk*, Kirk Douglas (né Issur Danielovitch) took small change for this change of pace, playing the titular Music Hall artiste who performed in clown face to become Germany’s top juggler.  (Douglas must have worked his butt off mastering this stuff.)  Settled post-war in the new state of Israel, he’s the one guy in camp without usable skills to help build the country, and either won’t or psychologically can’t juggle having lost his wife and children in the war.  Prone to hair-trigger violence (in his mind, anyone could be a Nazi), he beats up an Israeli cop after escaping camp and goes on the lam with a teenage kid as guide.  (Hey, it’s Joseph Walsh, the doe-faced lad who played the same role in last year’s HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN/’52 with Danny Kaye.)  Hiding out at a Kibbutz he meets sympathetic Milly Vitale and imagines a possible future unaware Tel Aviv detective Paul Steward has put a net out to find him.  With all the exteriors shot in Israel, Dmytryk concentrates on the manhunt elements (unfussily  shot by J. Roy Hunt) going for excitement rather than uplift, and Douglas, excepting an unfortunate attempt at a Señor Wences act, is on his best form.  Deglamorized, he rarely looked so good.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Kramer & Dmytryk’s next (and last) production under this contract was THE CAINE MUTINY/’54, a mega-hit that paid off all the underperformers, including this one.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Douglas went back to Israel for more conventional heroics in CAST A GIANT SHADOW/’66.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/cast-giant-shadow-1966.html

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