The Devil's Circus

Like fellow Scandinavian directors Sweden's Victor Seastrom and Finland's Mauritz Stiller, Denmark's silent pioneer Benjamin Christensen was eventually invited to Hollywood. There he directed seven films, half of which have survived to this day. His first film there was "The Devil's Circus", which like his best Danish work, draws its inspiration both from the religion and the macabre. Yet it puts them to work in a very halfhearted manner, as curiosities or additional spices to the mediocre narrative. The devil is briefly on the screen pulling the strings, but Christensen does not give the audience a full return to his pagan days, but instead delivers America's Christian audiences a safer morale tale.

The film is about an atheist (Charles Emmett Mack), who gets released from jail. He meets a religious girl (Norma Shearer), who has just arrived to the city from the country. She gets the man to put his life together, but he still ends up in jail for a second time. She herself gets a job as a trapeze artist in a circus, where she is sexually assaulted by the lion tamer. The big questions are, will the male protagonist revenge this, and will the main couple end up together?

The narrative is preachy and lacks a realistic feel. The circus sequences are over the top and silly. It's hard to tell what Christensen wanted to do with this film, as many aspects of it feel dictated by the studio heads. Norma Shearer, one of my favorites, did not want to make this film, and does not give one of her better performances in it. Then again the other actors aren't a bit interesting. Based on just his first Hollywood film, Christensen would have been better of staying in Denmark. Or better yet! After Seastrom and Stiller left Sweden, he should have traveled from Copenhagen to Stockholm, to fix the hole in the film industry left by those giants. Now that would have been a smart move.

The Devil's Circus is a beautiful meditation on the vanity and futility of human existence. Its plot is involved and at times borders on the maudlin, but it was made at a time when sentiments such as love and passion could be depicted without the irony and distance that are so necessary for 'serious' movies today. It depicts an individual who loses everything but finds his heart. Many of the scenes are disturbing in their artistic intensity. I was particularly taken by the circus scenes, which remind me of the painting Ensor, a famous Belgian artist whose work predates the movie only by a few years. The movie struck me more as having the aura of nineteenth-century Romanticism, giving it an unreal, spectacular quality. A must for any fan of silent Hollywood, who will find many of the cinema's great traditions anticipated in this fine work. I believe this was MGM's first production, underlining the film's important place in movie history.