Il circo e la sua grande avventura

I remember seeing this film as a lad on a family outing in Manhattan, topped off by my insistence that we have dinner at Jack Dempsey's Restaurant in Manhattan. Too bad the old champ wasn't there that day or it would have been a perfect Sunday.

Seeing it now on a formatted VHS the awesomeness of the spectacle during the scenes of the circus fires and the capsized ship in the harbor is really lost. It's quite an eyeful and should only be scene in theaters.

And the film would be revived, but we have a subdued John Wayne here and it's not for the better.

This was originally to be a Frank Capra film and Capra bowed out after creative differences with the Duke and some of the Duke's personal entourage. Read the Capra autobiography to find out exactly what they were, but they weren't fully fixed in the final product by director Henry Hathaway who later piloted the Duke to his Oscar in True Grit.

John Wayne was a guy who was usually very careful to give the public the Duke they expected. Even when he stretched his abilities it was done with a firm directorial hand.

We're asked to accept the Duke as a man who had an adulterous affair here. He also does not throw one punch in this entire film or fire a weapon in other than it being part of his Wild West Show. The people went to see John Wayne, but they didn't get their money's worth.

Pity because it would have been great to see John Wayne with Rita Hayworth in a great film. That couldn't have happened when they were younger because of Rita's contract with Columbia pictures and Wayne's personal boycotting of that studio because of his dislike for Harry Cohn. That story I won't go into.

Rita Hayworth who doesn't enter into the film until almost halfway through is fine as Wayne's lost love. She and Claudia Cardinale looked just fine in tights as trapeze artists. Lloyd Nolan as Wayne's sidekick is always good.

Richard Conte is Hayworth's brother-in-law and Cardinale's uncle. This fine actor is wasted here in a part that either was badly written or left on the cutting room floor.

John Smith was a Wayne protégé of sorts, Wayne gave him an early break in The High and the Mighty which he produced. Smith went on to star in the Laramie TV series and on completion of that he was cast opposite Cardinale, probably at Wayne's insistence. I remember always wondering what happened to him because he left show business shortly afterward. Then back in the Nineties I read he had died of cirrhosis of the liver. I guess you can fill in the blanks.

At the time Circus World came out, there was on television a prime time series called International Showtime. It was on Fridays at 8 pm. and it was set in a different city in Europe every week. Hosted by Don Ameche it featured the very best circus acts in the world. So did Circus World, but it certainly was no incentive for people to come out to see this when they could see the same thing at home. Also Paramount re-released Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth to a brisk box office business at the same time Circus World came out.

So for all these reasons Circus World flopped and bankrupted producer Samuel Bronstein. Nevertheless if you're a circus fan you will enjoy seeing this. But it's not the Duke his fans have come to expect.

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.

I watched this, for the first time since it was in theatres when I was 10, on YouTube in HD720 letterboxed at 2.20:1 on my internet-capable Blu-Ray player - the picture quality was outstanding. It was a different kind of role for Duke and, despite the obvious fact that it's not one of his or Hathaway's best, I found it enjoyable for a variety of reasons. Besides Wayne, there's Claudia Cardinale, John Smith whom I remembered from "Laramie" and one of my favorites, Lloyd Nolan. Not to mention Rita Hayworth. I enjoyed Jack Hildyard's beautiful photography and wish more films had been photographed in Technirama - it was such a versatile format, very high quality like VistaVision. I didn't let the picture's script shortcomings bother me - for my money (none!), they just didn't matter - or the probable fact that, if all it took to capsize a ship at the dock was a bunch of people rushing over to the side rail, it never would've survived an ocean crossing. Heck, it's make-believe, and it has ample verisimilitude to satisfy me. Just kick back and enjoy it.

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.

"Circus World" (1964), a grandiose Cinerama film directed by a Hollywood veteran Henry Hathaway, is a paradoxical case. The film was a big production, it had great stars, an acclaimed director, a highly appreciated screenwriter (Ben Hecht), and an even more celebrated writer behind the story (director Nicholas Ray), but yet the film has been, for the most part, forgotten. This is arguably justified since many do not feel that the film has the quality one might hope for. To my mind, the film's peculiarity is mainly due to its strange nature where the elegiac longing is combined with an extravagant approach. The story is very simple (an untold past tragedy casts its shadow on the present as a circus director, played by John Wayne, tries to create a successful show in Europe where he is reunited by his former lover, played by Rita Hayworth), but there's more than that to the film.

By this I do not mean that Hathaway had elaborated a subtle subtext to the film in question or anything like that. I am merely talking about the art of history. First of all, "Circus World" is a film directed, written, and starred by old Hollywood legends. It was also made half a decade after the old studio system started to crumble. Many contemporary critics have later felt that films such as "The Searchers" (1956), "Rio Bravo" (1959), and "North by Northwest" (1959) were the last ones of a kind. "Circus World", on the other hand, is as though a posthumous legacy, in a somewhat similar sense as "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1961). Moreover, the film takes place in the early 20th century and dives into the nostalgic world of the circus which often represents a carefree existence of play and work (closely studied in the film of Federico Fellini, for one). While the historical setting seems to echo the film's own production time in this sense (reminiscing about the good old days before the world wars, semi-analogous to the good old days of Hollywood), the film's melancholic tone is further enhanced by the fates of its leading stars. It is well-known that "Circus World" was not only the last film John Wayne made before his lung cancer operation but also the first film where Hayworth's alleged Alzheimer's disease started acting up, causing numerous problems with production. It is as if everyone involved had been through their best days, inevitably casting an impact on the quality of the film in question as well, but still came together to perform in the wild circus world.

This is why, in my opinion, the film's slow pace, effortlessly simple style, and naive story seem appropriate. It all seems to speak to the spectator on another level, so to speak. The film begins with emptiness and ends with fullness. "Circus World" is a film where an old world is softly breathing with modesty and ambition combined.