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Eastwood's Bronco Billy is foreseen from first to last, the caravan wagon is stuck under a downpour so the manager (Joe Cook) rides to the rescue astride an elephant. "The most unlucky circus in the world" comes to town, performers are unpaid and animals are hungry, the proprietress (Joan Peers) doubles as bareback rider. An officious creditor (Tom Howard) joins the biz, snagged as investor while still trying to figure out the fast-talker's palm-reading trick. ("Now here's a line that tells me you'll live to the ripe old age of 32." "I'm 40 already." "Well, too late to do anything about that now.") Ringmaster (Alan Roscoe) and lion-tamer (Adolph Milar) in cahoots, roustabout (Dave Chasen) with a painted finger where the hot dog should be, hoochie-coochie dancer (Louise Fazenda) wiggling "like a bowl of jelly on a frosty morning." Art and chutzpah, properly understood by Frank Capra as indispensable ingredients of the big-top show that is cinema. The open-air filming is freshness itself, then it goes indoors for a high-society dinner and it's a long-lost Marx Brothers movie. The camera is low for the trapezist slipping down a rope and high for the juggler's pins, the hose is turned on furious patrons but there's no water left when the tent goes up in flames. "Happy Days Are Here Again" on the calliope, a certain melancholia in the saltimbanque way: "Wonder what it feels like to live in a house that's not on wheels." The vaudevillian lights his cigar amid the ashes, a seed of Beckett concludes the shenanigans. "Some time ago I told you I had a horse that had the hives." "And I told you that I had a horse that had the hives and I gave him turpentine." "Well, I gave my horse turpentine and he died." "So did mine." With William Collier Jr., Clarence Muse, Edward Martindel, Nella Walker, Nora Lane, and Tyrell Davis. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |