Jumbo has a lot of reasons to be a white elephant. To begin with, the show is based on a Broadway musical of the same name that lost money in 1935 and hasn't been heard of since. What's more, the story is set in a circus, a subject that unfailingly transforms a moviemaker's grey matter into pink cotton candy. Furthermore, the picture has absolutely everything—Panavision, Metrocolor, stars galore, 200 animals, 2,000 extras, a $5,000,000 budget. Yet somehow in spite of, or because of, all the tanbark and trumpets, clowns and candy-butchers, high wires, low jinks and desperate little dogs that can't stop doing backward somersaults, Jumbo is a great big blubbery amiable polka-dotted elephant of a show, just the ticket for a holiday hoot with the wife and kiddies.
Onscreen as onstage, not the least of Jumbo's pleasures is its plot, shamelessly snookered from Shakespeare. Romeo (Stephen Boyd) is a daring young man on a flying trapeze. Juliet (Doris Day) is a bareback rider. A cruel fate divides them. His father (Dean Jagger) owns a circus, her father (Jimmy Durante) owns a circus—and the circuses are rivals. Romeo, sent incognito to swindle Juliet's father, falls in love with the lass instead. Duty at first conquers love, but in the end schmalz conquers all.
Director Charles Walters has the sense to let all this seem exactly what it is: nonsense. He skillfully mingles cinemagic and circus-pocus, and he almost always gets the best out of his players—including Jumbo, portrayed with massive aplomb by an animal named Sydney, who wears a size 92 top hat and, in profile, looks rather like Durante. Day as usual is blindingly sunny, but in a circus the glare seems suitable. Boyd, for once, talks without sounding as if he were a species of Boyd that chews worms. And Martha Raye is hilarious as an unfortunate fortuneteller who sometimes plays a lion. But the show belongs to Schnoz.
At 69, Jimmy Durante has shriveled away till he looks like a mere appendage of that incomparable proboscis, long may it wave. But age cannot wither nor custom stale his infinite sameness. In 1962 he is essentially what he was in 1950, when he made his last movie. He is Jimmy, a quite ordinary little fellow who looks slightly confused and absurdly belligerent, as though in total darkness he had stepped on the teeth of a rake, and the handle had popped up and hit him in the nose, and there he stands, punching wildly and wondering why he isn't hitting anybody. But as a comedian Jimmy is not in the least confused: he is the master of a style much subtler than it seems. Superficially, he is merely a matchless Mr. Malaprop —who but Jimmy could describe an elephant as a "pulchatoobinous pachadoim" and really seem to mean it? But look deeper. His comedy is grounded in an innocence as perfect as a baby's—or a saint's. Not since the late Harry Langdon of the silent days has the screen shown a comedian who, caught tiptoeing past the Big Top in broad daylight with a stolen elephant in tow, could throw up his hands and say with almost mystical fervor: "What elephant?"
Read more: Cinema: Absolutely Everything - TIME
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