The Flim-Flam Man

The Flim-Flam Man (titled One Born Every Minute in some countries) is a 1967 American comedy film directed by Irvin Kershner, featuring George C. Scott, Michael Sarrazin, and Sue Lyon, based on the 1965 novel The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man by Guy Owen. The movie has well-known character actors in supporting roles, including Jack Albertson, Slim Pickens, Strother Martin, Harry Morgan, and Albert Salmi.

The movie is set in the countryside and small towns of the American South, and it was filmed in the Anderson and Clark counties, Kentucky, area. It is also noted for its folksy musical score by composer Jerry Goldsmith.

Mordecai C. Jones – a self-styled "M.B.S., C.S., D.D. — Master of Back-Stabbing, Cork-Screwing and Dirty-Dealing!" — is a drifting confidence trickster who makes his living defrauding people in the Southern United States using tricks such as rigged punchboards, playing cards, and found wallets. He befriends a young man named Curley, a deserter from the United States Army, and the two form a team to make money. In their escapades, they wreck a town during a hair-raising chase in their stolen car, steal a truck loaded with moonshine whiskey that they sell, break out of a sheriff's office, and discover a riverboat brothel. In the ending scene, Mordecai explains how he sees himself.

The movie was filmed on location for the most part in Central Kentucky during the second half of 1966. Exterior filming was done in a number of locations including near Frankfort, Midway, Winchester, Irvine, outside Georgetown, and several other places. Filming involving trains was done in conjunction with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, and for a smaller part the Southern Railway System. Some interior filming (the inside of the Packard home and campsite sequences) was done on a sound stage specially built in Lexington, Kentucky at the Vaughn Tobacco Company warehouses.

Filming locations included:

William Rose was nominated for the Best American Comedy Writing award given by the Writers Guild of America.^{[citation needed]}

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times had kind words for Morgan's, Salmi's, and Pickens's characterizations, and praised the "slambang automobile chase," but wrote that the film could not "command and sustain a true farce style," a failing for which he primarily blamed the casting of George C. Scott:

Mr. Scott is not up to the role. He is a serious character actor trying to be a lovable old rogue. He is a fierce dramatic firebrand trying to be a frisky scamp. Made up with flowing hair and eyebrows to look a lot like a latter-day Fredric March, with occasional glances over his spectacles and smackings of his lips to remind one of Claude Rains, he plays this cornball con man skipping about through the South with all sorts of actorish frills and flutters that haven't a shred of art in them. He is not an expansive comic character, even remotely in a class with Mr. Fields, nor is he a fairly fascinating contriver of ordinary farce. He is an obvious performer on whom the make-up shows. And I shudder to try to tell you how affected and artificial is his voice.