One-Man Who's Who

The Great Impostor (Universal-International) is intended as an amiably wacky comedy of false pretenses. Adapted from Robert Crichton's bestselling biography, the picture dramatizes--and vulgarizes--a few of the more lurid episodes in the various and fascinating lives of Ferdinand Waldo Demara, the one-man Who's Who (TIME, Feb. 25, 1957).

Items: Private Demara (Tony Curtis) goes AWOL from the Army, fakes academic credentials, joins the Marines as an officer. When the FBI starts to check up, he jumps the fence, fakes more credentials, enters a Trappist monastery. When the Trappists find him too secular, to contemplate, they gently return him to the cruel, FBInfested world. After doing 18 months in a military prison, Demara borrows the warden's admirable prison record, gets a key job in a Texas pokey, makes a hit with staff and prisoners alike before he has to run. And so on till the hero joins the Royal Canadian Navy as a doctor, requests active service, performs spectacularly as a battle surgeon in Korean waters, gets his name and picture in the papers, finds himself exposed as an impostor and hailed as a Walter Mitty who makes his daydreams come true.

Unhappily, Demara is not a suitable figure of fun. He is a disturbed man, and no matter how cheerfully the moviemaker tells it, The Great Impostor is a sick joke. Like most sick jokes, it isn't funny.

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