Man on a Tightrope

This is a particularly fine film, but the other users missed an item that I would like to mention.

Namely, communism or, rather, the specific type of communism which was practiced within the old Soviet Empire, was a subtle poison to the human spirit.

In a critical scene, just before the fatal run across the border, the Circus manager questions a roustabout about his betrayal of his community(the Circus) and everyone whom he ever knew there. This man, with a straight face, announces that he and the other manual laborers are the heart and essence of the circus. Along with the movie audience, the manager(played by veteran actor Frederick March) is shocked that anyone could convince himself that people come to see him and his fellows, not the aerialists, not the lion tamer nor even the clowns.

There are no paranoid political rants here, but that form of communism is "busted" for its "divide and conquer" tactics. People took appalling risks to flee communism and this film gives the viewer part of why they were willing to take them. I couldn't imagine then and I can't imagine now that "a higher standard of living" was the reason for this.

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.

One of the more intelligent anti-Communist movies that came out in the Fifties was Man On A Tightrope, shot in Bavaria as close as 20th Century Fox could get to Czechoslovakia where the story takes place. Fredric March plays the lead, a circus owner who seemingly knuckles under to the new rulers of his country. For that his daughter Terry Moore is concerned with his mental health. His second wife Gloria Grahame thinks he's become a spineless weakling and starts casting her eyes about the rest of the show.

Not so because March has been ruminating about a plan to get over the border to West Germany and freedom and it's quite the scheme. But it will involve split second timing and the right opportunity which seems to have presented itself. He does have a traitor in his ranks who reports to the local party things in the performance that don't quite tow the party line. When local commissar Adolphe Menjou gives March an ideological pep talk about his clown routine, March realizes he'd better flee and fast.

This film was directed by Elia Kazan who has come down to us sadly as a friendly House Un-American Activities witness and was sadly booed at the Academy Awards when he got a lifetime achievement award. Kazan's long life ended in irony when Pat Buchanan spoke a eulogy on one of the talk shows. Then as now Buchanan was a guy Kazan would have despised, he always considered himself a man of the left.

But in his theater days he saw just how rigid and ideological Communists can be. I've long been convinced that each and every person who appeared at HUAC, friendly or hostile, each did it with his own motives and agenda, some good, some evil. Adolphe Menjou for instance was a rabid rightwinger who left a nice size bequest to the John Birch Society. His agenda was different certainly than Kazan's.

More than On The Waterfront which has come down in film history as Elia Kazan's apologia for being a stool pigeon, Man On A Tightrope is a far more personal work. March is playing Kazan as artist resenting any political intrusion of any kind in his work. Unless you realize that this film will have no meaning.

Kazan assembled a truly good cast and got some great performances, especially from Fredric March. Man On A Tightrope should be seen by today's audience for a real understanding of the era and of Elia Kazan.

...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.

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.