Man on a Tightrope (1953)

Directed by Elia Kazan

Dear Readers, I’ll bet a lot of you said to yourselves, “The Film of the Week has got to be The Great Escape!” — since, after all, our Word of the Week was escape, and for sheer film adventure with a breadth of characters, and such wonderfully fun actors to watch as Donald Pleasance, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, and Steve McQueen, you can hardly lose. Or perhaps we’d go with a prison film, as we’ve done here before, with The Birdman of Alcatraz, in my opinion the greatest prison movie made in America, even if it did soften the character of Stroud the bird-man. Instead, we’ve got what we consider to be a real find, Elia Kazan’s Man on a Tightrope, which recounts, in fictionalized but otherwise factually-based form, the escape of an entire circus, in broad daylight, from behind the Iron Curtain — from Czechoslovakia into Austria. But the heavily-guarded border is not the only tightrope the main character, Mr. Cernik (Fredric March) must walk, as I’ll explain.

First, though, I have to say that we were astonished to “discover” this film, because, when Debra and I were growing up, we saw all kinds of dramatizations of life on the wrong side of that Curtain, and of brave people trying to escape from the various workers’ paradises and into places like Austria and Germany. And with A Man on a Tightrope, we are not talking about a low-budget film with second-tier actors. Fredric March was a long-established star, and a winner of two Academy Awards; like Spencer Tracy, he could, so to speak, “disappear” into a role, so that you forgot you were watching him. He could play the monstrous Mr. Hyde, or the brave and intelligent President in Seven Days in May, or the soldier returning home to acclaim, to booze, and to marital problems in The Best Years of Our Lives. He could do about anything but sing and dance. The supporting cast in Tightrope is also strong: Richard Boone as the circus hand who is a true believer in Communism; Gloria Grahame as Cernik’s unfaithful wife, who learns to admire him and to love him again; Cameron Mitchell as an American who ended up stranded in Czechoslovakia; and the always sly and silky Adolphe Menjou, as the shrewdest of the Communist officials, and somehow also the most humane, who suspects that Cernik is going to try to bolt.

So Cernik really must walk a tightrope. His wife does not love him — or does she? The circus he runs has been in his family for three generations, and it’s just barely eking out a living for the performers and the hands. His daughter (Terry Moore, another excellent actress in her heyday in the 50’s) is in love with the American, whom he distrusts, because there is a spy in their midst. His main competitor would, he thinks, be delighted to run him out of business. But the main thing is the circus after all, yet in a way we do not expect.

Here is the thing. All that Cernik wants to do is to put on shows for people, to make them laugh and cheer and gasp with wonder. It’s a ramshackle affair, but we do get to see them in action at the beginning of the film, and the wide eyes of many a child of any age from five to eighty-five, as they gaze and gape at the elephants and the clowns and the acrobats and the knife-thrower and everybody. The thing is, the authorities have been demanding that the circus adopt “proper” ideological messages. But Cernik, called in for ignoring the latest demand, has said that he’s tried out their suggestions, and the audience simply wouldn’t laugh. In other words, he wants to be a real circus impresario, and that’s what he’s given his life for, but the ideologues won’t let him be. The scene in which he is interrogated by the most dogged of the Communist puritans (played by John Dehner, another of our favorite character actors) is both absurd and agonizingly tense at the same time. How do you explain laughter to an ideologue?

So it is that Cernik plans an escape. He doesn’t know who’s been ratting on him. He doesn’t know whether he can get some cover from his competitor. He doesn’t know whether, even if some manage to get through, others will be shot dead at the border. He doesn’t know if he can trust his wife. He doesn’t trust the man his daughter loves. He isn’t young. His plan is, in a way, a lot more gutsy than anything attempted in The Great Escape. And it does depend, absolutely, upon the circus — and on a universal human response to the things that circuses do. I won’t give any more details here!

And I have not mentioned that our director is the great Elia Kazan, whose films we have featured twice: On the Waterfront, and Wild River. What I admire most about Kazan’s work, other than that he gets best-ever performances out of his actors, such as Eva-Marie Saint, Jo Van Fleet, Karl Malden, and Marlon Brando in the films I have mentioned, is that his metier is man, man with all his folly and his weakness and his moral strength, placed in what looks like an impossible situation; and somehow he must rise above it. Karel Cernik is not a happy man; but he is loyal, and far more courageous than anyone knows. The man — not the geography, much less the politics — is the focus of our film. He is on a tightrope. Will he fall?

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