Salto mortale

Fredric March is a "Man on a Tightrope" in this 1953 film also starring Terry Moore, Gloria Grahame, Adolphe Menjou, Richard Boone and Cameron Mitchell, Directed by Elia Kazan, this black and white film is about circus performers who and a daring plan to escape to Germany from Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia. The manager of the circus, Karel Czernik (Fredric March) is a seemingly weak man - in fact, his second wife (Grahame) detests him for it. When he's called before Communist authorities for one or another infraction committed by the circus, he's deferential and nervous. Behind all this, he has been planning the escape of the entire circus from Czechoslovakia for three years. Only a few people know - but when the Commmunists ask about a radio owned by Czernik, he realizes one of his friends is probably a traitor, though he can't accept it. He also has trouble accepting his daughter's (Terry Moore) taste in men (Cameron Mitchell).

I visited Czechoslovakia eight years ago. The thought of that beautiful country and those charming, stunning people having to live for so long under Communist rule is a heartbreaking thought. This film really brought it home.

One thing immediately noticeable about "Man on a Tightrope" is the circus and the depressing Eastern Europe atmosphere, heightened by the black and white photography and the broken-down circus. Then there is the look of the people in the circus - these aren't actor's faces, these are the faces of real people. Kazan used a real-life circus, the Brumbach Circus, for background and performances. You can almost feel the dust and the oppression of working under Communist rule.

Fredric March gives a wonderful performance as Karel, a true actor who appears to bow to the Communists and yet is no weakling. His love for both his wife and daughter is apparent, as is his determination to get out of the country and concern for the performers. Gloria Grahame is sexy and flirty as his wife, who has her eye on the lion tamer, until she realizes the stuff her husband is made of. Moore and Mitchell are convincing lovers. Adolphe Menjou, as a Communist official, is very good as the only one who pierces the act that March is putting on. Smart men bear watching, and so do nice men. Cernik is both.

Apparently due to the political climate at the time, this film wasn't widely shown or publicized. I caught it on Fox Movie Channel - hopefully FMC will be on more basic cable in the country, and also hopefully Fox will bring this film out on DVD. It deserves to be seen.

This is a really fine movie, with some marvelous subtlety and powerful metaphor, despite the fact it shows its age. Great editing, good script, some superb scenes. I can't understand why it is not more widely known and appreciated. The Cold War is simply the setting; the unprepossessing story means far more.

For those who might be interested, this was the favorite movie of American poet Richard Hugo (1923-1982), who wrote several pages about it in his posthumously published 1986 autobiography, The Real West Marginal Way. A couple of Hugo's comments:

"The border becomes a kind of symbolic line separating the will from the imagination, the world of serious organizational adult responsibility from the paradise of childhood play."

"More than anything else, the music {of the amateurish circus musicians} attests to the poor odds facing not only the tacky circus but humanity itself."

...which is set in the Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia of 1952. Fredric March owns a small-time circus, except that now it's been taken over by the state, which wants to micromanage everything, right down to the clown acts. March and his performers want to escape across the border to part of Germany controlled by the Americans.

The film was shot in Bavaria, which is a big plus. The gritty, run-down circus atmosphere is nicely caught. We can see that although this is hardly a first-rate outfit, it still provides needed entertainment and escape for those who watch the show. As one might expect, the Communists have spies in the circus, and March doesn't know who to trust. His daughter (Terry Moore) has the hots for a young roustabout (Cameron Mitchell) who seems to have come from nowhere. His wife (Gloria Grahame) has the Gloria Grahame thing going on of despising her husband and looking around for someone to betray him with (Richard Boone seems a likely prospect). Betrayal is one of the big themes of the film. Even the Communist officials are looking for ways to betray each other.

This is one of my favorite Fredric March performances, particularly from this part of his career. Among a number of strong supporting performances by men, Adolphe Menjou stands out as a Communist official who sees March as dangerous precisely because he is an honest man. Menjou has remarkable presence every moment he's on screen.

Kazan gave a lot of credit to his producer, Gerd Oswald, and his cameraman, Georg Kraus. It's a solid film, and I look forward to seeing it again.

Sleeper classics are rare. Esthetics do not change, but politics do. This movie has a political message -- that communism is horrible, and that life under communism is bare existence. That was not enough for the McCarthy Era, and this movie falls short of the standard anti-communist diatribe of its kind. The view of someone like Vaclav Havel that communism was mere degradation of people and the imposition of an absurd order was not "hard-line" enough for the McCarthy Era.

This movie shows a more subtle critique of communism than the usual apocalyptic view of saber-rattling generals and madman tyrants. Czechoslovakia could have been the shopfront for communism because it wasn't as ravaged by World War II as were some other countries, and the Soviets didn't treat it as a conquered province grafted onto its empire. The country was prosperous before World War II and had a democratic government for twenty years after World War I. Even in Czechoslovakia, the communists imposed one degradation after another upon the people while promoting itself with demagogic rhetoric that communism was the desire of the working man -- except that nobody had the right to say "no" anymore. The communists nationalized Cernik's circus, only to pay him a very generous salary as compensation as a manager of a state enterprise; then they made the money worthless through currency "reforms" that pauperized all but the communists and enriched the communists. Sudden horror and slow degradation lead to the same misery, only at different rates.

Politics aside, this is a good adventure film with some comic elements as the circus crew fights among itself to seek escape from the madhouse (note that Milos Forman said that his image of an asylum for the insane was much like his native Czechoslovakia in comments on "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

Too subtle for the 1950's, it got lost. In the cable-TV era "movie archive" channels try out some lost movies and occasionally find a gem. This one is a gem.

Kazan, in his "A Life", describes this movie mostly in terms of early-morning bonding with his crew, but while it contains far fewer emotional lightning-bolts than most Kazan films, it also contains some incredibly poetic violence. Even though it's hard to tell if it's just hastily staged or artistically muted, one shot of a sentry being killed just below the screen is both intimate and shielding. The battle scenes are exciting, short, and brilliant. Kazan takes no credit at all, saying that much of the film was devised by producer Gerd Oswald and cinematographer Georg Kraus. Strange and sparse, this is a very interesting film.