Cinema: One-Man Who's Who

The Great Impostor (Universal-International) is intended as an amiably wacky comedy of false pretenses. Adapted from Robert Crichton's bestselling biography, the picture dramatizes—and vulgarizes—a few of the more lurid episodes in the various and fascinating lives of Ferdinand Waldo Demara, the one-man Who's Who (TIME, Feb. 25, 1957).

Items: Private Demara (Tony Curtis) goes AWOL from the Army, fakes academic credentials, joins the Marines as an officer. When the FBI starts to check up, he jumps the fence, fakes more credentials, enters a Trappist monastery. When the Trappists find him too secular, to contemplate, they gently return him to the cruel, FBInfested...