I never knew until yesterday that before getting into acting, the great Burt Lancaster was a circus acrobat. Not to be stereotypical, but swinging around in mid-air wearing tights would be the last thing I would have expected from a New York Irishman that once was described as "shaving with a blowtorch."
With his movie stardom at its peak in the mid-1950s, Lancaster became a producer as well, and TRAPEZE was among his first productions. Now Stars have always wielded their power to get pictures financed based off their niche hobbies, but Lancaster's love for the art of the flying trapeze actually isn't misplaced, and TRAPEZE is a surprisingly good movie.
There is a certian glee when an actor actually do their own stunts, or in this case, Lancaster himself performing a considerable number of flips, swings, and rope grappling high above in an arena, much of which without the movie cutting away. Now that's just awesome. Though I actually got distracted at times with TRAPEZE when the other two high-flyer actors obviously used stunt doubles and trick editing for those big top scenes.
Anyway, Lancaster in TRAPEZE is a world-class acrobat "flyer" forced into retirement by a nasty injury (much like Lancaster in real-life), and spends the rest of his day as a stagehand at a Paris circus. A much younger Tony Curtis shows up, traveling all the way from Brooklyn to get this legend to help train him into pulling off the greatest of acrobatic feats, the vaunted and ultra-risky Triple Somersault, of which only 6 men have ever pulled off, including Lancaster.
The very beautiful, and thick accented, Gina Lollobrigida politicks this side of Shawn Michaels into their trapeze act, and thus everything is threatened by the obligatory love triangle.
Now you read that plotline and you think, you've seen this before, and you think you know how this movie will play out...but that is where TRAPEZE tricks you. You expect alot of contrived bullshit and screentime about the mentor playing hard to get with the student, but no they immediately hit off in their initial scene.
When an old flame of Lancaster's returns to the circus with her jackass of a French hubbie, you assume she'll leave him ultimately for Burt. She's definately tempted, but she chooses instead to stay with her horses.
Lancaster indulges in an affair with Loolobrigida not because he realizes Curtis might be tapping some good ass, but initially because he wants to keep the kid away from the woman that is distracting him from the Triple Somersault.
Then with the film's ending, there seems to be a glimmer of hope for reconciliation between this tri-party...but its not to be.
I think credit for making TRAPEZE much better than it should have been considering its generic plot must go to director Carol Reed, the helmer of the legendary masterpiece THE THIRD MAN, and Lancaster. There are so many moments in the picture when they could have simply jobbed out an easy audience-pleasing exit for any of the characters, or go on automatic drive with the storyline.
Instead, they tried very much to craft a tale about the politics behind not just the circus, but of the entertainment industry itself, and the age-old feud between the quest for artistic purity and making more money. TRAPEZE doesn't defy the Gods nor shake the pillars of the cinema heavens, but its a well-told tale using a truckload of cliches, and giving several of them a different fresh spin.
You know, this is why I love the cable channel Turner Classic Movies, or TCM. They don't just play the classics or the favorites, but these little good forgotten gems, some of which like TRAPEZE aren't even on DVD in America...in spite of that particular title being one of the biggest hits of 1956.
Why MGM has alot of crap on DVD, but not this? Someone over there should be forced to fly without a safety net.
