Poor Michael Gough gets the worst of it here early on with a very gruesome demise that has to be seen to be believed. In what is essentially a color retread of "Straight Jacket", Joan Crawford plays the mannish looking owner of a traveling circus, seducing new trapeze artist Ty Hardin with all the determined and unromantic allure she can muster. She has no time for nonsense such as real romance, not with bills to pay, feuding performers to keep from killing each other, and Scotland Yard breathing down her neck because of sudden accidents on the high wire with the trapeze artists falling to their deaths. Then out of the blue comes a musical number that wouldn't have been out of place in the musical "Side Show", a ridiculous and unbelievable death involving a broken spring on the box sliced in half (where the victim doesn't scream until the blade would be half way through them), and the revelation of the killer which seems so out of place and took my rating down a bit.
So yes, Crawford is still glamorous looking, but it is easy to see why many people insists that as she got older, Crawford looked more like a drag queen than a fading 30's movie legend. Ty Hardin is ruthlessly sexy, using his manly wiles to get what he wants from Crawford to move up in the ranks of the circus (and obviously with the intention of getting his hands on it by manipulating Crawford into marriage), and Diana Dors is malevolently vindictive as part of a magic act that goes wrong. Even then, she's so nasty to everybody around her that you know she won't be missed, and the gruesome way she's taken care of might even be applauded by some! Judy Geeson is wide eyed innocence with some sly motivations as Crawford's daughter, kept out of sight for the first part of the film by being away in boarding school. The scene where she's kicked out and returned to Crawford reminds me of the scene in "Mommie Dearest" where Faye Dunaway, as Crawford, must pick up daughter Christina after she is expelled.
I enjoyed the hysterical, if lengthy dog act, that takes up a good five minutes during part of the film, and when trapeze acts do happen without incident, the tension is unbearable. The humor quotient is high, as is the camp element of the film, with more than just Crawford's overly made up face (with still great looking legs in tights) getting unintentional laughs. It is a bad film that ranks higher because it is extremely enjoyable on so many levels. What weakens it is the revelation of the guilty party that has no motivation and just seems to be a desperate measure for the screenwriter to proclaim their being smarter than the audience who would never predict this, unless they picked up clues that I somehow missed.
So yes, Crawford is still glamorous looking, but it is easy to see why many people insists that as she got older, Crawford looked more like a drag queen than a fading 30's movie legend. Ty Hardin is ruthlessly sexy, using his manly wiles to get what he wants from Crawford to move up in the ranks of the circus (and obviously with the intention of getting his hands on it by manipulating Crawford into marriage), and Diana Dors is malevolently vindictive as part of a magic act that goes wrong. Even then, she's so nasty to everybody around her that you know she won't be missed, and the gruesome way she's taken care of might even be applauded by some! Judy Geeson is wide eyed innocence with some sly motivations as Crawford's daughter, kept out of sight for the first part of the film by being away in boarding school. The scene where she's kicked out and returned to Crawford reminds me of the scene in "Mommie Dearest" where Faye Dunaway, as Crawford, must pick up daughter Christina after she is expelled.
I enjoyed the hysterical, if lengthy dog act, that takes up a good five minutes during part of the film, and when trapeze acts do happen without incident, the tension is unbearable. The humor quotient is high, as is the camp element of the film, with more than just Crawford's overly made up face (with still great looking legs in tights) getting unintentional laughs. It is a bad film that ranks higher because it is extremely enjoyable on so many levels. What weakens it is the revelation of the guilty party that has no motivation and just seems to be a desperate measure for the screenwriter to proclaim their being smarter than the audience who would never predict this, unless they picked up clues that I somehow missed.