oscaralbert Review of Circus World

Circus World (1964)

Perhaps it's not exactly THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH . . .

[7/10 · 12 December 2015]

. . . and it obviously was aimed at the impaired prostate crowd, with all of its entrance music (for last minute leaks), intermission scoring (for mid-stream relief), and exit tunes (for guys who just cannot wait another second). But CIRCUS WORLD star John Wayne chose his projects carefully (no, he's NOT the killer clown, as you might guess), and he was sharp enough to realize that if half the geezers with one foot in an old folks home Ponied up to see this flick, he'd be able to corner the market on Panamanian shrimp (which he did, in Real Life). If you told a bunch of screenwriters the plot of CIRCUS WORLD, they'd tell you that it would be a real stretch to pad out such thin material to as long as a 90-minute film. But "Il Duce" never had any truck with people who could communicate in complete sentences, so he stubbornly insists here upon chewing up a lot more than he bit off during a grueling 143 minutes. My party was laughing hysterically as Wayne's "Matt" character shinnies up to the peak of the Big Top to save "Lili" from an inferno. Because even if CIRCUS WORLD had been a million years longer, Matt would still be trying to get off the ground!