18 Minutes

Lion tamer Gregory Ratoff adopts an orphaned girl, and the entire circus helps raise her. When she has grown into Kathryn Segava, she marries Ratoff...and immediately falls in love with new audience favorite, John Loder.

Yes, it's that old story, although usually it's the circus's leading clown who is cuckolded. Ratoff is pretty good as the arrogant, self-confident lion tamer, but everyone else is ok at best, with Benita Hume getting a small but showy role.

The overwrought, romantic score is attributed to Alexis Arkhangelsky, and therein lies an enigma. He is credited with the scores of four movies, two of which had Ratoff showing up in the credits. Other than that, there's no sign of the fellow. Google suggested I wanted Aleksander Arkhangelsky, and there was a man that way, but he is credited as a composer of church music, and died in 1924. So that's a mystery. Also, why is one of the alternate titles "18 Minutes"?

"18 Minutes" is also known as "This Woman is Mine" and "King of the Circus" and is a very cheap British B-movie. I say very cheap because although the acting is good, as you watch the story, it's obvious they cut a few corners to save money. In particular, to have the lion tamer 'tame' a lion, he's CLEARLY superimposed across the picture...so obvious that it even looked very cheap back in 1935.

The story begins with Nikita the Fearless (Gregory Ratoff) working as a lion tamer at a circus. Two things soon happen to him...he adopts an orphan girl and raises her. He also buys a lion with a bad reputation...one that killed its previous tamer. The idea is that it will bring in tons of customers to know he's tamed a man-killer!

Years pass. Lida has grown into a lovely woman and men are certainly noticing her. Now here's where it gets a bit weird. Nikita marries his adopted daughter because he's jealous of these other men...plus, he's obvious got issues. She agrees to the marriage but it's obvious her heart isn't in it. Soon she meets a handsome man and he sweeps her off her feet...and it's NOT Nikita! What's this odd man going to do about this? Well, considering he married his daughter, you can only assume the worst with this strange, freaky man.

This is not an especially great film. The biggest problem with it, aside from the lion taming scenes, is that Nikita is practically impossible to like....not only because he has the hots for his daughter (I know...she's not biologically his...but this is still nasty) but because he's a bit of a jerk otherwise. As for Lida, she really doesn't have a lot of personality....like some sort of piece of toast. Unless you love circus-incest pictures, this one is easy to skip.

The first thing to say is that contrary to the view of an earlier review this is not a B film. It was originally 88 minutes long,but was cut down to 68 minutes by it's American distributor.

It has an interesting cast. Gregory Ratoff was a pal of Darryl Zanuck,and was for a time under contract to Fox. His most famous role is in All About Eve. He never lost his Russian accent,and is a bit to understand at times.

Benita Hume was to go on to marry Ronald Coleman. Richard Bennet was the father of Joan and Constance Bennett and great grandfather of Morton Downey.

John Loader was a rather wooden leading man of the thirties.

The plot is rather silly,with lots of back projection and doubles for the numerous lion taming scenes.