Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

tomsview I must admit I had never heard of "Man on a Tightrope" until I read Elia Kazan's autobiography, "Elia Kazan: A Life".The story is based on a true event; the escape of the entire Circus Brumbach in 1950 from East Germany to West Germany. Renamed Cirkus Cernik in the film; they escape from Czechoslovakia.Kazan tells how he agreed to make it only after he found that the story was true. He travelled to Bavaria and met the people of the circus and developed a great rapport with them.Kazan had just named names at the HUAC hearings, and was receiving hate mail and hostility from former friends and associates. Although he had once been in the communist party, he claimed he had long ago become anti-communist, and he felt right at home with these circus people who had fled a repressive communist regime; they didn't feel he had done anything wrong at all. It was a healing process for Kazan.Kazan respected the cast and crew in this film: the real circus people who played small parts or worked as extras, but also his American performers. Most weren't major stars, but he admired the honesty with which they approached their roles. They had to rough it; Germany 8-years after the war didn't provide the comforts of Hollywood. Fredric March whose career was winding down, warned him that he sometimes overacted, but he gave an affecting performance as circus owner Karel Cernik. Gloria Grahame as his cheating wife was never photographed to better advantage; she seemed naturally beautiful without her usual heavy makeup. Terry Moore as Cernik's daughter insisted on doing her own stunts including the scene in the fast flowing river.Despite being based on fact, some rather predictable dramatic elements were added and the film was hacked by the studio; ultimately it failed at the box office. However the film has a brilliantly authentic look and when you know a little of how it was made and the circumstances surrounding it, it gains a dimension far beyond what we see on the screen.

brower8 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.

the_old_roman This is an interesting movie about the members of a circus troupe trying to flee Communist domination while battling amongst themselves. Adolphe Menjou is spectacular as a down-on-his-luck government functionary. Gloria Grahame is chilling in her scenes. Richard Boone and Cameron Mitchell lend professional support.

dadndsc This little movie is an exciting sleeper. It is a fictional story of a real incident about a small circus in an Eastern Bloc country that planned to escape to the West during the cold war. With uniformly excellent performances by all one of its unique accomplishments is the creation of a real sense of place. Although most of the cast is North American and speak in English, through the use of carefully written dialog, well thought out characterizations and wordrobe you have no doubt that you are in a foreign country listening to people speaking in their own language.A real candidate for resurrection and re-isse.