Perfect cast and a good story

good back-story, and good acting

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I must admit I had never heard of "Man on a Tightrope" until I read Elia Kazan's autobiography, "Elia Kazan: A Life".The story is based on a true event; the escape of the entire Circus Brumbach in 1950 from East Germany to West Germany. Renamed Cirkus Cernik in the film; they escape from Czechoslovakia.Kazan tells how he agreed to make it only after he found that the story was true. He travelled to Bavaria and met the people of the circus and developed a great rapport with them.Kazan had just named names at the HUAC hearings, and was receiving hate mail and hostility from former friends and associates. Although he had once been in the communist party, he claimed he had long ago become anti-communist, and he felt right at home with these circus people who had fled a repressive communist regime; they didn't feel he had done anything wrong at all. It was a healing process for Kazan.Kazan respected the cast and crew in this film: the real circus people who played small parts or worked as extras, but also his American performers. Most weren't major stars, but he admired the honesty with which they approached their roles. They had to rough it; Germany 8-years after the war didn't provide the comforts of Hollywood. Fredric March whose career was winding down, warned him that he sometimes overacted, but he gave an affecting performance as circus owner Karel Cernik. Gloria Grahame as his cheating wife was never photographed to better advantage; she seemed naturally beautiful without her usual heavy makeup. Terry Moore as Cernik's daughter insisted on doing her own stunts including the scene in the fast flowing river.Despite being based on fact, some rather predictable dramatic elements were added and the film was hacked by the studio; ultimately it failed at the box office. However the film has a brilliantly authentic look and when you know a little of how it was made and the circumstances surrounding it, it gains a dimension far beyond what we see on the screen.

One of the more intelligent anti-Communist movies that came out in the Fifties was Man On A Tightrope, shot in Bavaria as close as 20th Century Fox could get to Czechoslovakia where the story takes place. Fredric March plays the lead, a circus owner who seemingly knuckles under to the new rulers of his country. For that his daughter Terry Moore is concerned with his mental health. His second wife Gloria Grahame thinks he's become a spineless weakling and starts casting her eyes about the rest of the show.Not so because March has been ruminating about a plan to get over the border to West Germany and freedom and it's quite the scheme. But it will involve split second timing and the right opportunity which seems to have presented itself. He does have a traitor in his ranks who reports to the local party things in the performance that don't quite tow the party line. When local commissar Adolphe Menjou gives March an ideological pep talk about his clown routine, March realizes he'd better flee and fast. This film was directed by Elia Kazan who has come down to us sadly as a friendly House Un-American Activities witness and was sadly booed at the Academy Awards when he got a lifetime achievement award. Kazan's long life ended in irony when Pat Buchanan spoke a eulogy on one of the talk shows. Then as now Buchanan was a guy Kazan would have despised, he always considered himself a man of the left.But in his theater days he saw just how rigid and ideological Communists can be. I've long been convinced that each and every person who appeared at HUAC, friendly or hostile, each did it with his own motives and agenda, some good, some evil. Adolphe Menjou for instance was a rabid rightwinger who left a nice size bequest to the John Birch Society. His agenda was different certainly than Kazan's.More than On The Waterfront which has come down in film history as Elia Kazan's apologia for being a stool pigeon, Man On A Tightrope is a far more personal work. March is playing Kazan as artist resenting any political intrusion of any kind in his work. Unless you realize that this film will have no meaning.Kazan assembled a truly good cast and got some great performances, especially from Fredric March. Man On A Tightrope should be seen by today's audience for a real understanding of the era and of Elia Kazan.

Kazan, in his "A Life", describes this movie mostly in terms of early-morning bonding with his crew, but while it contains far fewer emotional lightning-bolts than most Kazan films, it also contains some incredibly poetic violence. Even though it's hard to tell if it's just hastily staged or artistically muted, one shot of a sentry being killed just below the screen is both intimate and shielding. The battle scenes are exciting, short, and brilliant. Kazan takes no credit at all, saying that much of the film was devised by producer Gerd Oswald and cinematographer Georg Kraus. Strange and sparse, this is a very interesting film.

I've seen this movie several times over the years, usually on American Movie Classics or as a commercialized network movie. To me, the movie is a real classic, with wonderful acting and a most interesting plot and story. It would be very easy to imagine such an event taking place under those less than ideal times in the Eastern Bloc. I am surprised, and disappointed, that this movie classic is not out on video. If it should ever be released to video, I would prefer that it be issued on DVD (hint,hint in case a studio should look in).