Sat 13 Oct 2018
Archived Movie Review: THE GREAT DIAMOND ROBBERY (1953).
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews[10] Comments
THE GREAT DIAMOND ROBBERY. MGM, 1953. Red Skelton, Cara Williams, James Whitmore, Kurt Kaznar. Director: Robert Z. Leonard.
Sort of a quiet, sedate comedy, with Red Skelton playing a simple sort of soul who just happens to work for a diamond company. He is also an orphan, and the people he comes across who claim to be related are really (not surprisingly) a bunch of crooks.
Read the title again and you will know everything there is to say about the story — except possibly that Cara Williams, who plays the girl who is supposed to be his sister, falls in love with him instead, and — you can finish it up from here. (Spotted in bit parts were Olan Soule and Jack Kruschen, long time radio actors.)
— Reprinted and very slightly revised from Movie.File.8, January 1990.
October 13th, 2018 at 5:15 pm
Images and other enhancements later tonight!
October 13th, 2018 at 6:21 pm
Not up to the quality of the three Whistling films, but fun.
October 14th, 2018 at 4:18 am
Red Skelton had a long successful career as a comic, as someone who described himself as a person who loved to make other people laugh. He was a long time star on radio, made a few movies, some of them very good, then was a huge star on TV. I was a big fan of his when I was in high school, but I came home on breaks from college, even then I was starting to think the various characters he played — starting with Clem Kadiddlehopper — were wearing awfully thin, if not out and out corny.
Is he just another comedy star from the past who no one younger than me remembers anymore?
October 14th, 2018 at 10:23 am
Steve – I’m not sure if I’m younger than you, but we watched Skelton on our rickety roll-about TV set when I was a kid back in the ’50s. Never missed a show. He loved to break through the fourth wall a lot. Anecdote: My mother was a waitress at a popular lounge in the D.C. area some time in the ’30s, and she remembered an up-and-coming young comic named Red Skelton. As she recalled it, the tips were better when he was performing there.
October 14th, 2018 at 1:27 pm
Do we really want to back to our ongoing battle against The Evils Of Demographics (THE Junk Science Of The Millenium)?
The fact that so many of the classic comedians and their work are still available, but just not shown because they’re old/outdated/dead/any or all of the above …
As a kid in the ’50s, I got to see many of the old-timers on TV; the fact that a number of them had already passed on made no difference to me or my siblings – funny was (and is) funny.
Lost my thread here – sorry …
October 14th, 2018 at 2:17 pm
Steve, part of Skelton fading from memory is his silly happy style that doesn’t fit well in today’s gritty cynical pop culture.
Few people look to the past for entertainment unless the past had been part of their lives.
Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Marx Brothers are just some that still survive. But others fade as humor taste change.
October 14th, 2018 at 2:22 pm
5, Mike Doran, you and I can soon stop arguing about demographics as TV’s future is with commercial free streaming where number of total bodies paying for the service matters.
October 14th, 2018 at 5:02 pm
At the time that Skelton’s TV show was canceled someone took a closer look at it and reported there was no mystery why that happened.
October 14th, 2018 at 7:26 pm
Skelton’s mix of physical comedy, pathos, and sentiment is out of fashion currently, but then so is Chaplin’s, though I am not comparing the two beyond that.
His bit in THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES is still a favorite.
I’m more a fan of his films now than the reruns of the series, but he did go a long way to making one comedy super star, Johnny Carson.
Back in the eighties when I had ankle surgery my orthopedic surgeon had an office full of Skelton’s clown paintings.
October 15th, 2018 at 5:44 am
We saw Red on stage three times, and he projected a love of his work that captivated the audience — and won outsized laughter for some awfully tired jokes.
“I’ll say this about Gloria’s cooking: She cured that dog of beggin’ at the table.”
A lot of this came through on the tube, with Red’s ad libs, but less so (in my opinion) on the big screen.