Decades before Frank Abegnale

Several weeks back TCM had an evening of movies dedicated to Tony Curtis, which included a movie I hadn't heard of before, The Great Impostor. The plot sounded interesting, so I decided to watch it while it was still on the Watch TCM app.

The movie is based loosely on the life of Ferdinand Demara, a real life impostor who eventually got caught out in the early 1950s, went to prison for it, and sold his life story, since in those days there weren't really yet laws about not being able to profit from telling the story of your criminal activities. In the late 1950s a book was written about Demara's story, and with the popularity of that book came a movie. Tony Curtis plays Demara, and at the start of the movie it's the early 1950s. He's been working at a school on an island off the New England coast, and seems to be a fairly popular teacher too. But his past is catching up to him again as the authorities come for him. This causes him to reflect on that past....

During the Depression, Ferdinand had been the son of a small-town movie theater owner (Gary Merrill) who unfortunately lost the theater because of the financial situation. Young Ferdinand drops out of school to try to earn money to help the family, and eventually leaves the family to join the military. Ferdinand is quite bright, and would be a natural of Officers' Candidate School, but there's one catch: you have to be a high-school graduate to apply to OCS. The GED wouldn't be developed until World War II, so Ferdinand doesn't have any way to go back and get that diploma or certificiate to enable him to become an officer.

To get around that little problem, he takes on somebody else's identity, until he learns that the military also does background checks of would-be OCS members. Now that he knows he's going to be caught, Ferdinand decides to fake his own suicide and get out of the military, instead joining a monastery with the intent of becoming a Trappist monk. Their vow of silence will also keep the authorities from finding him for quite some time.

Unfortunately, the abbot who is the head monk at the monastery determines that Ferdinand doesn't really have what it takes to be a Trappist monk, so it's back into the real world for Ferdinand, meaning that his crimes will be discovered. However, he uses prison as an opportunity to learn how to become an assistant warden, with some help from a little more identity theft. Of course, he'll eventually get noticed again, leading to the final act as a naval surgeon in Canada during World War II.

If you can get past the idea that the timeline seems all wrong here and the questions of how he was able to evade detection for so long over and over again, there isn't a bad little movie in The Great impostor. Unsurprisingly, the sort of smooth operator role that Curtis had recently played in Operation Petticoat and Some Like It Hot comes naturally, and works well for The Great Impostor. The movie is also aided by a couple of pretty good supporting performances courtesy of Edmond O'Brien, Raymond Massey, and Karl Malden.

The Great Impostor seems to be free with ads on the Roku Channel for now. It's definitely worth a watch.