Word: jumbos
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...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...
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...
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...
With the slaughter of Tufts behind them, the Crimson should have added confidence in its abilities. The Jumbo game was more than Harvard's first win--it was also the first time the team jelled into a coordinated machine. Offensive patterns were worked through to their logical conclusion, and both the zone and the man-to-man defense held...
...whose long novel The Carpetbaggers ran into the millions of sales. Robbins writes with a spade, and of course he heaped Carpetbaggers with sex; a choice passage follows a call girl as she shaves a particularly hairy client with a straight razor and jasmine soap, dumps him into a jumbo bathtub, pours champagne over him as if he were a quart of fresh strawberries, then jumps in to help him splash...