Red Skelton's final film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was a surprisingly modest affair for the studio's one-time big money-maker. In 1951, Skelton inked an exclusive $5 million contract but his subsequent films for MGM were under-performers as the fortyish former vaudevillian lost his audience to such younger up-and-comers as Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. Skelton, too, was becoming disenchanted with movies and had by 1951 begun to channel his energies into the burgeoning field of television. Premiering in September of that year, The Red Skelton Show was an instant hit, and would remain on the airwaves for twenty years. As a contractual obligation, The Great Diamond Robbery (1953) finds Skelton in subdued mode, ceding the majority of the funny business to his costars in the tale of a naïve diamond cutter who unwittingly falls in with a band of swindlers (among them, James Whitmore, Kurt Kazner, and leggy Cara Williams) bent on absconding with the $2 million Blue Goddess Diamond. Though MGM's publicity department heralded this newest film starring "the world's funniest man," the The Great Diamond Robbery was shot on the cheap by Robert Z. Leonard and fobbed off on movie theatres as a second feature. Nearly a decade later, Skelton reunited with leading lady Cara Williams for a Christmas-themed episode of The Red Skelton Show titled "Freddie and the Yuletide Doll."

By Richard Harland Smith