CIRCUS WORLD  drew a typically catty hiss from Bosley Crowther, reviewing for the NY Times, who pronounced John Wayne “without peer in his ability to deliver a line badly.”  Well, sometimes, but frankly, if my name was Bosley Crowther I’d be careful whose diction I tickled.  The 1964 movie is a great-looking but lumbering behemoth, as our favorite amiable galoot heads a Wild West Show/circus touring Europe in 1901, dealing with the usual Big Top headliner jealousies and can-she-do-the-trick-and-live? acrobatic dilemmas.

A fed-up Frank Capra bailed on the project after turning in a script that was unusable and due to conflicts with Wayne buddy/sycophant James Edward Grant, who then wrote his own schlocky screenplay. Volcano-tempered Henry Hathaway came on to direct, fired Grant and brought in Ben Hecht to bang on the typewriter, along with Julian Zamet. Producer Samuel Bronston coughed up $9,000,000.

A worldwide take of only $4,400,000, with a terrible draw in the States of just $1,550,000 (44th place) registered as a flop, and along with the greater box-office disaster of The Fall Of The Roman Empire that same year, killed off producer Bronston’s movie empire.

Wayne ambled through it, although he narrowly escaped being scorched when filming one of the big set-pieces, a massive circus tent fire, ducking out in the nick of time before a large chunk of the inferno collapsed on top of him.  He was also burned by co-star Rita Hayworth’s lateness, temper tantrums, drunkenness and generally abusive attitude.

Aside from some snazzy circus acts and that fiery finish the show does have a genuinely socko sequence where a ship capsizes, a surprising and bravura episode. Otherwise, 135 minutes of pedestrian ho-hum hokum, with Claudia Cardinale (energetic), Lloyd Nolan, John Smith (who credited a vindictive Hathaway with killing his career), Richard Conte, Kay Walsh, Miles Malleson and Katherine Kath. Dimitri Tiomkin did the score, Jack Hildyard the cinematography. No doubt it was a knockout in Super Technirama 70. Not an awful movie by any means, just sort of deflated.  Since the silents era there been at least 158 movies that have dealt in some fashion with circuses or carnivals. “La-dies and gentle-men!”……