There's Waldo
Back in 2017, I wrote this article here about a 1960 movie, The Great Impostor. It starred Tony Curtis and was based on a true story about Ferdinand Waldo Demara who had an amazing life avoiding the law, while taking on a wide range or remarkable jobs he had absolutely no training for -- including a prison warden, college dean, Trappist monk. and most famously a lieutenant surgeon for the Royal Canadian Navy in the Korean War....for which he was decorated! (In fact, that was the only reason he was found out, because of the news reports about the honor.)
As you might imagine, the film is a companion piece of sorts to the much-later true story movie, Catch Me if You Can in 2002.
I mention this because Turner Classic Movies is showing The Great Impostor tomorrow Saturday, June 3, at 7 PM West Coast time. (Probably 10 PM in the East.) It's a movie whose style is very much of its early-'60s era, as I recall -- I haven't seen it in many decades, since a kid at summer camp -- but it's got a very good pedigree. In addition to Tony Curtis, the movie features Edmond O'Brien, Karl Malden, and Raymond Massey. And the director is Robert Mulligan, who directed To Kill a Mockingbird. It's also based on the book by Robert Crichton, who wrote the best-seller The Secret of Santa Vittoria, which was made into a movie that starred Anthony Quinn. The Great Impostor doesn't get shown often, and my memory of it is that it's a lot of fun, and worth setting the DVR for. Especially since I don't know when it will next show up.
The movie clearly romanticized and embellished some of the story -- among other things, Tony Curtis is a lot more dashing than Ferdinand Waldo Demara, who looks more like Sen. Jon Tester -- but years later in college I tracked down a Life magazine story on Demara, and it turns out that a lot of the film surprisingly hung close enough to the truth. (Most surprising were the operations he truly did perform on a Canadian naval ship during the Korean War.)
Here's the trailer. It's only fair, but you'll get the idea --
And as a bonus, here's the real Fred Demara as a guest on You Bet Your Life, with Groucho Marx -- who actually does an unrelenting job trying to pin him down. The Demara segment comes along at the 6:45 mark (and his chat with Groucho comes after a long interview with his goofy, contestant partner). That's him below --
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