(1953)2.5Bruce EderThe Juggler was one of a brace of worthy, challenging, and -- with one exception (The Caine Mutiny) -- financially unsuccessful films produced by Stanley Kramer at Columbia Pictures in the early/middle 1950s. And while all of those films -- which include The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Sniper, Member of the Wedding, and Death of a Salesman -- have something (and sometimes many things) to recommend them, The Juggler carries terrific frustrations for the viewer, as well as a lot of unfulfilled ambition; one heartily wishes it could be labeled an unqualified success, and the fact that it falls short shows the limitations of even the best-intended use of a plethora of filmmaking and story-telling talent. Movies about "survivor guilt," as it later came to be called, are a relative rarity even in the twenty-first century, and in the postwar world were even more difficult to get made -- The Juggler is, on its face, a distant cinematic precursor to pictures such as Sophie's Choice, produced in an era when there was no obvious audience for such a film.
The movie's main problem lies not so much in the script -- though the latter does have its flaws, despite being the work of Michael Blankfort, adapting his own novel -- as in the direction, and the tone of some of the performances. Kirk Douglas is fine in the first third of the movie as the disturbed concentration camp survivor -- and director Edward Dmytryk finds just the right tone in the early part of the picture. It's a gasp-inducing scene, even viewed in the twenty-first century, when the new immigrants to the State of Israel, refugees all, and mostly fearful and uncertain, find themselves in an arrival camp in Israel, facing barbed wire fences and uniformed men watching over them. The main difference between where they were and where they are, apart from the fact that this is patently not a death-camp, is that most of these guards are not armed with guns, and tend to talk and question before they act, they don't act to harm or kill, but to protect. But this is a distinction that is blurred for Douglas's Hans Muller, who can't relax for a moment in any surroundings resembling the German concentration camp in which he was held. And this mood of fear and suspicion, leading to an explosive and potentially deadly misunderstanding with a police officer, is captured perfectly. It mostly falls apart, however, once Muller is on the road, escaping on foot, after he meets a young traveler played by Joey Walsh. It's as though the movie switches to travelogue, and the tone lightens as Muller, suddenly showing more rationality and cunning than he has hinted he possessed up to that point, adopts the pose of a wealthy American ("from Hollywood") walking across Israel.
And it's as though he is suddenly parodying Kirk Douglas, and the effect on the movie is almost lethal in the middle section, altering the tone of everything we see. And that's a real tragedy, not only for the effectiveness of the film but as a testament to Douglas's talent, considering how good he is in the first and last thirds of the film -- one looks that these scenes and wonders how wrong-headed the direction could be, especially from a talented hand like Edward Dmytryk. The introduction of Milly Vitale as a young widow of the 1948 war does get the film back on the right track, and the low-keyed but ominous scene in which a Syrian border patrol appears also restores some needed tension to the mood of the film, carrying the picture to its ending. There are virtues here, to ne sure, despite the problems with the center section of the film -- a scene between Jay Adler as a middle-aged refugee, trying to persuade his young daughter (Beverly Washburn) that it's okay to tell these police where her friend went, is almost heartbreaking. And the earnestness of everyone involved, including Paul Stewart in a rare leading role, and a brace of character players including Charles Lane, Richard Benedict, and Adler and Washburn, all doing their level best, makes The Juggler a treat for fans of actors' movies, as opposed to action movies. A typical suspense-oriented manhunt/thriller would have been the easy way to do this picture, but to their credit Dmytryk and Blankfort didn't take that approach. And the glimpses that this movie provides of the then newly-founded State of Israel, and some of the realities facing the country in the wake of the 1948 war, also make it an interesting history refresher for modern viewers.
A man finds himself running from both the police and his own troubling memories in this drama. Hans Muller (Kirk Douglas), a German Jew, was once a well-known juggler before he was committed to a concentration camp; Muller survived, but his wife and children did not. After the war, Muller and many other displaced people found themselves in a temporary camp in Israel; his experiences have left him upset and confused, and several of the guards notice that he's behaving oddly. Muller flees the camp after one day, but while running away, he's stopped by Kogan (Richard Benedict), an Israeli policeman. When Kogan asks to see Muller's papers, he immediately flashes back to an unsetting memory in which a Nazi officer asked the same question; Muller panics, attacks the cop, and flees for Mount Carmel. In the morning, Muller encounters a group of children who believe the story he tells them: that he's a tourist from the United States. One of them, Yehoshua (Joseph Walsh), is making his way to a kibbutz in Syria, and Muller, who hopes to get to some friends in Egypt, joins him. Muller entertains the young man by teaching him to juggle, and they become close friends. When Yehoshua is injured by a land mine, Muller rushes him to a hospital, where he meets Ya'el (Milly Vitale), a woman who lost her husband to Arabs. A romance soon blossoms between Muller and Ya'el, and he confesses to her that he's on the run from the police; meanwhile, Israeli Detective Karni (Paul Stewart) is combing the nation, searching for the juggler -- not to arrest him, but to convince him that he's not wanted for murder, and that others want to help him. Michael Blankfort, who wrote the original novel upon which The Juggler was based, adapted the screenplay and also served as executive producer.
