The Juggler (1953)

one of films who could be defined as special. for theme and for inspired manner to translate it on the screen. for Kirg Douglas performance. for its place in the category of films about Shoah. for the science to present the start of Israel in a poetic-realistic manner. for humor and for the scene of dance and for the shadows of past in the life of the lead character. a film who impress. because it seems be almost a documentary-drama. because it gives more than a List of Schindler . and for the science to use old classic themes and motifs for recreate a kind of beautiful testimony. the force of it - high science to suggest. and a great cast.

On the Holocaust Eve. 5/4/16, I watched this film on Israeli TV. I love old films,but this time, it had a special meaning for me. It turns out that my mother was staying at a retreat in Kibbutz Hanita in the Upper Galilee in Israel while this film was shot there(1953). She remembers that the guests were sitting and watching the filming, and says that Kirk Douglas was very handsome. I could also recognize places in downtown Haifa, my hometown, where the policeman scene was filmed, and to see Haifa harbor as well. It was very exciting to hear it from my mother and to see familiar places in a film that was made before I was born.

He came out of a camp, and his family was killed in a concentration camp. He is now in Israel, in another camp where they are working on his integration, but somehow he can't believe it's all over. He runs away and mistakes a policeman for a Nazi. What is nice about this film is that it shows an Israel, just after its creation, with a remarkable cinematography in black and white by J. Roy Hunt. We feel throughout the film a spirit of collaboration, of trying to help, in spite of Hans Muller's (Kirk Douglas) action of hitting the policeman, seeming inexcusable. Also a great scene of Muller's redemption dancing the Hora. Like another reviewer I first saw this film with my father ,was greatly impressed, tried to find it with no success until now. Apart from some scenes where Douglas overacted and the final scene, overdone, this film did not age. And the fact that it shows the country of Israel, the language and the people, so unusual for an American film at that time, just that, makes it worth seeing.

One of Kirk Douglas' more intense performances,it is a pity that this movie should remain a buried treasure."Surviving the horror" could be another title for "the juggler" .A Jew ,who has lost all his family and who has known the concentration camps comes back to the promised land in 1949.Life during WW2 camps has often been described,but life AFTER the nightmare is a subject which has rarely been told in movies with a few exceptions ("die Morder sind unter uns ":Susanne's character and "Exodus": the young man played by Sal Mineo).But never as successfully as here.Hans cannot forget.His psyche is shot."I'm the juggler and the juggled" . He tries to find back his dear departed although he knows they were killed.He suffers from claustrophobia and Douglas makes us FEEL his disease (the film owes a great deal to this extraordinary actor),and every time he sees men in uniform ,he thinks of his torturers.Admirable sequences: Douglas in the desert town ,with all these walls which imprison him ,and those men around who are threats .The minefield where the distraught man and his young pal are rescued by their fellow men who form a human chain.In his absorbing memoirs,Douglas wrote that he once helped Dmytryk who was one of the Unfriendly Tens .But when they made "the juggler" ,the director acted as if they had never met.Douglas thought he was ashamed for having been an informer.But he did not judge him at all.What would I have done if I had been in his shoes ? he wrote.Many films might suggest that Dmytryk was suffering from of a strong guilty feeling: "the sniper" with his burned arm,José Ferrer's arm in a sling in "Caine Mutiny" .And in this film ,Douglas "gagging" his arm-mouth ,or covering it to hide his tattooed number.I agree with all the precedent users.A film which must be restored to favor.