The Juggler

Back at the beginning of the year, TCM ran a couple of nights of movies appropriate for Holocaust Remembrance Day, which gave me the chance to record one I had seen show up cut to pieces for one of the digital sub-channels, The Juggler.

The movie opens with a title card telling us that this is Haifa, in 1949. Haifa is the big port city in the then newly independent state of Israel. As mentioned prominently in Exodus and one or two other movies, after the end of World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps, Jewish refugees tried to make their way to Palestine, only to be blocked by the British mandate, but once Israel became independent, the country was able to take in as many refugees as it could handle.

Among the refugees is Hans Muller (Kirk Douglas), a German Jew who had been a juggler and clown in the circus in his native country, and successful enough to be prominent and to have picked up good English along the way (in the context of the movie, Muller doesn't speak Hebrew but does speak English; this isn't just the characters speaking English for the sake of a Hollywood movie). But then he and his family were put in the concentration camps and he was the only one to survive, with his wife and children being murdered.

As a result of the horrors Muller saw, he's got a bad case of PTSD, not that anyone really knew all that much about it in those days, and certainly not in a new country like Israel which had much more pressing needs, like how to get all these new refugees into appropriate work. Muller is put in the barracks of the main refugee camp, which isn't for him because he's had enough of camps, especially if he can see any barbed wire.

So Muller escapes and makes his way into Haifa, although where he's going is a good question. In Haifa a policeman sees him and Muller sees the policeman too. Muller, thanks to his experiences in Germany, has a primal fear of the police, and acts like a cornered animal, trying to fight his way out when the policeman finally does catch up to him. Muller knocks the policeman unconscious and, thinking he's killed the guy, flees.

The cop is found by a Dutch tourist (John Banner) and the police investigate, led by Detective Kami (Paul Stewart). Muller falls in with a group of adolescents, most of whom are with a school group, although there's one kid, Yehoshua (Joey Walsh) who isn't. When Yehoshua learns that Muller was a juggler, he wants to become one himself.

The two eventually wind up at a kibbutz in Galilee near the Syrian border, an area which was mined to prevent the Syrians from invading, since at the time they still held the strategically important Golan Heights. Yehoshua goes boundering off and sets off one of the mines, knocking him unconscious and breaking his leg. The kibbutzniks save both Yehoshua and Muller, Muller being put up in a small house by Ya'el (Milly Vitale).

Predictably, Muller finds himself falling in love with Ya'el, although keeping everybody from finding out the truth about his past is in the back of his mind, and unsurprisingly, the police are closing in on him, leading to the movie's finale.

The Juggler is a movie that's fallen into relative obscurity, and I think it's somewhat understandable why. The movie was produced by Stanley Kramer and released by Columbia, and I wouldn't be surprised if rights issues help up a DVD release. Stanley Kramer's involvement, combined with the subject material, make it an obvious candidate for falling into the trap of heavy-handed social commentary, and that does happen to an extent here. In particular, the movie ends too suddenly, as if it didn't know how to resolve the issues it set up.

On the bright side, there's a good performance from Kirk Douglas, with the highlight being a performance he puts on for the children of the kibbutz. The movie was also the first Hollywood production made on location in Israel, which also works well even if it's only in black and white. Paul Stewart puts in a professional performance. I don't know that he ever got to be a lead, but it's easy to see why he was able to work for decades in so many movies and TV performances as a supporting character. Vitale and Walsh are adequate.

The DVD of The Juggler does seem to be available at Amazon, but last I checked, not at the TCM Shop.