El fabuloso mundo del circo

I´m a big John Wayne Fan but this movie is very boring. John Wayne is acting like he thought the same in 1964. He is totally uninspired - like the whole movie is. 133 minutes and I fell asleep after 80 minutes. Endless scenes with animals, clowns and artists (one of them Rita Hayworth who looks like she will fall asleep every moment, too). In the beginning a ship is sinking and I thought I´m looking "Titanic" and in the end the circus tent is burning. But these scenes are without sense, only action - boring action. One of the movies of John Wayne you don´t need to see.

Is The Magnificent Showman a good movie? Not really. Is it entertaining? In some ways, yes, but it also has a number of problems. As far as John Wayne go, The Magnificent Showman is not among the best like The Searchers, Fort Apache and The Quiet Man. But he has also done worse in his career as seen(in my opinion that is) with The Conqueror, Brannigan and The Green Berets. In fact, it probably belongs somewhere in the middle.

I did very much like how The Magnificent Showman looked. The cinematography, effects, costumes and sets/scenery are amazingly effective. There are also some scenes that hold up well and entertain, particularly worth of note are the climatic fire and the capsizing of the circus ship, both scenes are full of excitement and tension.

The Magnificent Showman was begun as Circus World, directed by Frank Capra. As much as I very much like Capra and his films, Henry Hathaway, who the film was later entrusted to, in my view was much more suitable for the job. And while there are some assets that don't work as well as they should, Hathaway does deserve credit for directing as solidly as he did.

Aside from the cinematography, effects and set pieces, the other outstanding asset is Dmitri Tiomkin's score, which is energetic, beautiful, haunting and rousing as it should be. And while I wasn't that impressed really with the acting, two performances do stand out- Rita Hayworth and Claudia Cardinale. Hayworth is captivating and Cardinale is a sheer delight. Together they are even better, here they seem to be having a contest at who's the best at upstaging the other, and it is a lot of fun to watch. Just for the record, I think Cardinale just about wins the contest.

These aside, I was divided personally on the performance of John Wayne. I do like Wayne a lot, but I wasn't sure about him here. What I did like was his charisma, Wayne was a very charismatic actor and that comes loud and clear here. However, for my liking his delivery of the lines seemed rather stiff and there were times where I couldn't help thinking he was too old for the role.

The film is too long, at 133 minutes it is very lengthy. This wouldn't have mattered so much if the pace and story were good, sadly neither were as solid as I would have liked. There are a fair number of exciting scenes that do elevate the story, but the more talky and slower moments are rather sluggish. The story had a great concept to work from, but the final result seemed rather over-stuffed and cobbled together, also some plot points could have been better developed. But my main gripe was the dialogue, some of which was really quite bad being very clichéd and silly.

All in all, entertaining enough but has a lot of flaws that stop it from being any more than that. 6/10 Bethany Cox

I can't understand how a producer like Samuel Bronston, who gave us the 70MM spectaculars "King of Kings" and "El Cid", could deliver something as poor as this. And with Henry Hathaway directing it's even more of a puzzle. Is it that bad? Well you see there's this circus ship docked in France performing on deck and when a crowd of people move to one side it falls over. Does not list. It just falls over. And then it won't sink. I think some of the sets were salvaged from "The Fall of the Roman Empire". There isn't even a clear timeframe i.e. year or decade. The editing along with terrible backdrops and processed shots are amateurish. Dimitri Tiomkin wrote some of the most beautiful scores for motion pictures but I think he was watching "The Nutcracker", by mistake, when he penned this one. It is kind of fun to watch a young Claudia Cardinale play a naive superstitious acrobat. But Lloyd Nolan and Richard Conte are never really given a chance to fulfill their parts. The basic storyline is not a bad one, it's just the execution of it. If you like John Wayne playing "The Duke" here he is. Watch it and file it for old times sake. If your a Rita Hayworth fan, here she is, lovely and charismatic as ever. These two stars carry the show . The rest is not much to talk about. And that's how I rate it. 2 Stars.

When you just enjoy an actor's gift, even a bad movie can be somewhat entertaining. I have seen many movies by John Wayne and some movies many, many times. I prefer the early westerns, war years films and even some of the appearances on The Tonight Show, Dean Martin Show and even the Roasts of the late '60's and '70's. As a matter of fact Wayne's movies dominate my collection of VHS and DVD. You a can always find bad movies in a list of an actor's work, especially when the actor has done over 150 movies in 50 years. Don't care what the policital views are. Just enjoy the film for what it is, a movie, not reality. Sit with a bowl of popcorn or gooey movie theater candy and enjoy a movie where you have to imagine rather than have thrilling stunts thrown at you every 35-45 seconds. Relax for a while.

Forget about John Wayne for a moment and in my opinion viewers should applaud the magnificent performance of Rita Hayworth and despite health problems holding the audience in the palm of her hand. She returns a disgraced woman to John Wayne's circus to reconcile herself with her daughter, played excellently by Claudia Cardinale. No more spoilers except to say that the scenes Hayworth have with Wayne, just after her return are gut wrenchingly moving. She shows her age proudly and seemingly without makeup, or the minimum, her beauty coming from within and without. Every second of her on the screen are moments of joyful appreciation that she took on the role. The scenes with her and Cardinale are also some of the best in cinema. This is a film worth buying even if like me circus films, and animals in cages are not appreciated in any sense. Of course there is a lot of excitement with a ship sinking, tent on fire etc and inevitably Wayne playing cowboy and killing off the indigenous population with fake gunfire in the circus ring. A very low point this but thankfully it is not in a real Western. His acting is also at a low point, but he too had health problems. To sum up it is for the two great women actors and it is their stories that count, and again in my view not the formula acts of the circus.