The Big Show ** (1961, Esther Williams, Cliff Robertson, Robert Vaughn, Margia Dean, Nehemiah Persoff, David Nelson) – Classic Movie Review 3400

This familiar-feeling big top melodrama, with its old tale of circus family conflicts, is a sneaky reworking of themes from the big-city drama House of Strangers (1949) and the Western Broken Lance (1954) without actually being a remake in the third variation of Jerome Weidman’s novel I’ll Never Go There Any More.

Nehemiah Persoff plays Bruno Everhard, the tough and rigid owner of a German travelling circus. Cliff Robertson and Robert Vaughn star as his good and bad sons respectively, with Vaughn’s character grasping his way into taking control.

Bruno’s four sons and daughter all work for the circus and are performers in it. But three of the sons, in particular Klaus (Vaughn), resent the favouritism Bruno shows his favourite son, Josef (Robertson). Esther Williams gets in the swim for a dramatic role as the wealthy American woman, Hillary Allen, who falls for Josef and wants him to quit the circus and begin a better new life.

[Spoiler alert] Many of the big-top stars are killed, but the good son takes the fall and is sent to prison, yet, of course, good triumphs in the end.

Produced by Associated Producers and distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox, it was lensed in Munich, Bavaria, with leading Euro-acts. Made in DeLuxe Color and CinemaScope, it is directed by James B Clark, and produced by him with Ted Sherdeman, who wrote the screenplay.

Also in the cast are Carol Christensen, Margia Dean, David Nelson, Kurt Pecher, Renata Manhardt, Franco Andrei, Peter Capell, Stephen Schnabel, Carleton Young, Philo Hauser and Mariza Tomic.

David Nelson was best known to audiences of the time for The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet TV show.

It is Williams’s penultimate movie, before Magic Fountain (1963) with Fernando Lamas, whom she married in 1969.

Esther Williams (August 8, 1921 – June 6, 2013).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3400

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