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.