The "big circus" of the title is in financial difficulties, so its owner, Henry Whirling, approaches his bank for a loan. The bank president Jonathan Nelson agrees, subject to the condition that Randy Sherman, a bank official, will join the circus on tour to manage the financial side of the business. Whirling reluctantly agrees to this condition, but his working relationship with Sherman is a difficult one. Sherman has no interest in circuses, and even advised the bank not to grant the loan, advice which was overruled by Nelson. Whirling (clearly no supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment) is particularly upset by Sherman's decision to hire a female press officer.
The film tells the story of the circus's subsequent event-filled tour across America. There are a number of interlinked subplots. One is concerned with the efforts of a rival proprietor to sabotage Whirling's circus by infiltrating a saboteur into his company. (The identity of the saboteur remains hidden until the final scenes). The wicked rival is named Borman, possibly a reference to Nazi leader Martin Bormann. Another subplot tells of how Sherman's attitude changes as he comes to respect the circus as a way of life as well as a business, and how he even falls in love with Whirling's attractive younger sister Jeannie (who has ambitions to become an acrobat herself). Whirling, in the meantime, finds himself falling for Helen, the press officer. Another plot line concerns Zach Colino, Whirling's star acrobat, and his efforts to come to terms with the death of his wife, who dies in a train crash caused by the saboteur.
Although Whirling is supposedly the hero of the story, he does not come across as very sympathetic. Part of the blame for this lies with Victor Mature, never the most energetic of actors, who does not try very hard to make his character likable but part must also lie with the scriptwriter. It is a common plot device for characters who will later fall in love to start off by quarrelling or disliking one another, but Henry's initial churlishness towards Helen simply leaves the audience with the indelible impression that he is a churl. The scene in which he goads the recently-bereaved Zach into attempting a dangerous high-wire crossing of Niagara Falls by accusing him of cowardice seemed very cruel, even after Henry gave the implausible explanation that he was doing Zach a kindness by helping him to recover his self-respect. To invert the well-known proverb, you've got to be kind to be cruel.
The film implies, incidentally, that Zach's feat made him the first man to cross Niagara on a tightrope since Charles Blondin. Whereas Blondin was indeed the first man to perform this feat (in 1859), he was soon followed by numerous imitators, and a crossing of Niagara became a standard exploit for Victorian acrobats.
Apart from Gilbert Roland as Zach, none of the other characters stood out. I guessed- wrongly- that Vincent Price's ringmaster would turn out to be the saboteur, simply because I could not credit that the producers had hired such a big-name star to stand about with so little to do and with no major role to play. Neither of the female leads, Rhonda Fleming as Helen nor Kathryn Grant as Jeannie, made much impression. This was (at the age of 26) Grant's last feature film before she left the cinema to marry Bing Crosby, and, although she was undoubtedly attractive, it could not be said, on the basis of this performance, that she thereby deprived the cinema of a major talent.
Another reviewer complains that "the circus movie genre is regrettably slim". The circus, in fact, with its colour and pageantry, had a certain attraction to film-makers in the days when the cinema needed to rely upon visual spectacle in order to compete with television, but the reason that relatively few circus-themed movies were made is that circus stories (both in the cinema and other media) rely upon a few well-worn plot conventions which have become clichés. Most of those clichés are trotted out here- the escaping lion, the fire, the train crash, the acrobat in danger of falling to his death, the clown whose smiling mask conceals a guilty secret (in this case alcoholism) and, above all, the stoical the-show-must-go-on philosophy, taken in this film to absurd lengths. (The death of one's wife is not, it would appear, regarded among the circus fraternity as a good excuse for missing a performance). There are a few exciting scenes- mostly involving Zach- but this is, for the most part, a rather dull, clichéd melodrama. 5/10
