TRAPEZE (1956) High entertainment

I was a young kid when I first saw the circus drama TRAPEZE, and naturally taken with the acrobatics. All these years later I can still appreciate the quality of the stunts, which, though primitive today, manage to combine editing and stunt doubling to excellent effect. But more than that, I appreciate the film’s old-fashioned movie-ness. It’s just plain fun to watch. Burt Lancaster portrays a cane-toting “catcher” previously crippled while performing a dangerous triple mid-air somersault, and Tony Curtis is a young, aspiring "flyer" who begs Lancaster to teach it to him. Their partnership and friendship are undermined by the arrival of beautiful, ambitious circus tumbler (zaftig Gina Lollobridgida), and quickly we have both a love triangle and a contest as to which of the three looks best in spangled tights. Lancaster, a former circus aerialist, does much of his own trapeze work. Others in the cast include Thomas Gomez as the dollar-hungry circus owner; Katy Jurado as a bareback rider and Lancaster's friend and former flame; and Johnny Puleo, a sweet, harmonica-playing dwarf. Directed by Carol Reed (THE THIRD MAN), TRAPEZE is a reminder of a long gone era when movies starred stars. (Trivia note: Lancaster and Curtis co-starred again the following year in the gritty, noirish SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, of which film critic Anthony Lane wrote: Burt Lancaster, wearing the scariest spectacles in the history of cinema – they appear before he does, on the side of a truck – plays a Broadway columnist (based on Walter Winchill) and Tony Curtis is a scurrying press agent, 'the boy with the ice-cream face.' This is a great New York riff in which the quality of malice is not strained.)