NR | 1 h 45 min | Drama | 1953
Karel Cernik (Fredric March) once owned Cirkus Cernik, and his father before him. But in 1948, the communist-led state and party nationalized the circus, allowing him to stay merely as manager. Cernik remarried after his first wife died; his second wife Zama (Gloria Grahame) lives on site, but isn’t a performer. However, his nubile daughter Tereza (Terry Moore) from his first marriage, does perform.
The authorities bully Cernik as they do circus-owner rival, Barovic (Robert Beatty), but with one difference. Submissive, Barovic overhauls his act to reflect party-mandated propaganda. Defiant, Cernik merely tweaks it. Cernik’s excuse? Under the big top, the party’s ideas are neither funny nor entertaining. That defiance costs him.
Authorities seize his permit that allows traveling circuses free passage in the region. Their reason: “disobedience which approaches treason.” Worse, impressionable Tereza falls for new circus hand Joe Vosdek (Cameron Mitchell), thwarting an overprotective Cernik, who thinks he’s a party spy.
For three years Cernik has plotted escape. Now fed up, he executes that plan. But the spy betraying him to authorities, isn’t who Cernik thinks he is. That misjudgment threatens to derail his escape and endanger his crew.
Kazan hires the real-life Cirkus Brumbach to perform the acrobatic elements, and shoots in Germany to lend authenticity to his film. Robert E. Sherwood’s occasionally melodramatic screenplay draws on Neil Paterson’s novel of the same name.
Realistic Portrayal
Kazan manages a circus-themed film without pointing his camera too long at spectacular or set-piece circus acts. Instead, he dwells on everyday camp life, weaving in rehearsing performers as background: jugglers, knife-throwers, dancers, acrobats, clowns, animal trainers, balancing acts. You see elephants shuffle, you hear lions roar, and you can almost smell the thick stench of animal fur and dung that overhang circus tents.At no point do camp scenes look like a film set. They have the worn-down, worn-out, worn-thin look of a real circus that’s traveled too long, too far. Weariness pervades every caravan coach, with each performer shut in his or her own private hell, dreaming of a freedom that lies tantalizingly ahead, as if just after their next act.
One shot has four workmen hammering, in sequence, a tent stake into the ground. The rat-a-tat-tat of their metal meeting metal, sounds like a devil’s tattoo drumbeat (four fingers hammering down, in quick sequence), daring prowling party officials to break their spirit. There are several such images of defiance toward the climax but one early on is of young lovers, Tereza and Joe, cavorting in a flowing stream, choosing to be happy in a place where the very idea of happiness is deemed criminal.
Kazan mocks communism’s false grandeur, its illusion of omniscience, ubiquity, solidity, and permanence.
As he prepares to escape, Cernik painfully barters away parts of his gig to a combative Barovic, who’s bargaining to stay tight-lipped about it all. Cernik leaves behind tents, seating, and heavy equipment. But he won’t give away his performers, the soul of his circus.
Kazan is saying that unless people are free, the trappings of freedom are merely death in disguise.
After a particularly inane interrogation session in a suffocatingly lit room, beneath ominous photo-frames of Lenin and Stalin, Cernik reassures the secret police that he has no secret allegiances that they need fear. He pleads, “Circus people aren’t like other people. The only nationality we have, the only religion we have is the circus. We have no politics. We have no home but the circus.”
In that tortured defense of his circus, Cernik captures his zest for artistic freedom as a showman. He also confesses fear, as one accustomed to walking a tightrope, at how vulnerable, how shaky that freedom is. It’s almost as fragile, as fleeting as a traveling circus tent: a magnificent canopy held up by ropes and rails at daytime, brought down to a harmless heap that evening and gone overnight, as if it had never been.
