A Masterpiece!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

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

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.

Other IMDb reviewers miss a subtle point. This manages to simultaneously savage communist oppression and anti-communists from the House Un-American Activities Committee. SPOILER: When the secret police question the circus owner, he explains that he has no politics, that circus is his politics, his religion, his life. For the interrogator, all must submit to the primacy of the political. I imagine Kazan felt the same about the theater and his movies, and HUAC certainly demanded the same submission. Watching this on TV today, I thought it was a European film. And no other film from this period that is anti-communist has this degree of sophistication or subtlety. I would love to hear Milos Forman's opinion of this film.

(Some Spoilers) One of the best depiction of Communism coming out of post-war Hollywood "Man on a Tightrope" shows what happens to a country taken over by band of mindless bean counting bureaucrats who feel that they have all the answers to all the country's, and worlds, problems and anyone who thinks otherwise is an enemy of the state that's to be liquidated or imprisoned. Trying to make a living as a circus master which is the only job he ever had Kanel Cernik, Fredrick March, is hamstrung by the Communist system controlling his country the Czecoslovkian People's Repubic.With the country's controlling communist party running everything Karel's circus is having a hard time staying afloat with it being nationalized and it's many fine and entertaining circus acts, as well as performers, shut down or fired. All this because their being too capitalistic, so the Communist state party says, in their themes. This insane policy is formulated and followed by both the local commissar Fesker, Adolphe Menjou, and his boss only known as The Sergeant, Phillip Kennealy. Two by the books butt-kissers who's always trying to one up each other in order to gain favor with their superiors in both Prague and Moscow.Just about having all he could take from his Communist masters Karel together with a numbers of his troupe including his wife and daughter Zema & Tereza, Gloria Grahame & Terry Moore, decide to make a break for it with the entire circus and its animal performers across the Czech/Austrian border. To gain complete surprise, from the Czech broader guards, it's decided by Karel to make this very daring and dangerous escape in broad daylight a time when it would be least expected.We soon find out that Commissar Fesker has knowledge of the planned escaped from someone inside the circus troupe and just as he's about to clamp down on it, by giving Karel a permit in order to force his hand, he's overruled by the arrogant and power hungry Sergeant. Sargeant with his action unknowingly gives Karel all the leeway he needs to make make, with his entire circus family, his breathtaking run for daylight and freedom, across the Iron Curtain.Unbelievably tense and exciting movie that keeps you glued to your seat until the final credits as Karl Cernik and his band of circus performers, together with his wife and daughter, make their way to the very border of Austria. Within yards of the border Karl & Co. then go for broke as the startled guards on both side of the border, the American and Czech, are left almost too paralyzed to either help, in the case of the Americans, or prevent, the Czech, them from doing so. Karel who during the entire movie was anything but a hero in his dealing with both the Communist government officials and his wife Zama makes up for all his inadequacies by preventing his planned escape from being foiled by a traitor inside his circus. Karl shot and bleeding to death prevents the advancing Communist government troops and police, by insisting to be the last man out, from overtaking his circus performers and family. Thus not only forcing them back to their native country but to either curtain death or a Soviet concentration camp-like gulag in the wilds of Siberia.Unlike the many anti-Communist movies that came out of Hollywood back in the 1940's and 1950's "Man on a Tightrope" is as watchable now as it was back then in 1953. The movie shows what Communism really is, a rotten and degrading system, and how it in its anti-humanistic and bankrupt economic philosophy was destined to have a total and complete collapse and meltdown some forty years later more then proved that point.

This is an interesting movie about the members of a circus troupe trying to flee Communist domination while battling amongst themselves. Adolphe Menjou is spectacular as a down-on-his-luck government functionary. Gloria Grahame is chilling in her scenes. Richard Boone and Cameron Mitchell lend professional support.