(Psycho-Circus) Circus of Fear (1966)
Circus of Fear, in large part a regulation and stereotyped mixture of whodunit cliches and the familiar tricks of Edgar Wallace, author of the source novel, is nonetheless distinguished by a good cast, an indelible ’60s B-movie atmosphere, and the moody, occasionally stylish direction of John Moxey, the interesting director of City of the Dead (1960) who later settled into a career of mostly TV work, making the first The Night Stalker (1971) telemovie.
The film commences with a snappy heist sequence that is a classic of its kind, as a gang of criminals, including the seedy and fanatical-looking Klaus Kinski as Manfred, stage a daring robbery of an armoured van, using the Tower Bridge as a device in their plan.
They ambush the vehicle and strip it of its cash load, running the bags down a wire onto a waiting launch from the bridge deck. One of the criminals, Mason (Victor Maddern), is the inside man, having gotten a job as one the van’s crew, and when his fellow driver tries to make a getaway, Mason shoots him.
The gang successfully elude pursuit on the Thames, and Mason, a hot potato, rather than travel with the other members, is ordered to head north and hand over the lion’s share of the loot to the planner of the robbery. Most of the gang is caught when an anonymous tip-off sends the cops after the van they ride in: only Manfred and Mason are left free, and Mason, after ditching his hire-car, is killed by an unseen knife-hurling assailant at the rendezvous place.
These opening scenes are a class apart from the rest of the film, worthy of Peter Yates or Robert Hamer, who used the same locations in his Brit-noir classic The Long Memory (1952). Moxey employs the locations, including the always-emblematic Tower Bridge but also the then-dilapidated, run-down Shad Thames area, and, later, in Mason’s flight across the country and dumping his car, glimpses of a cheerless countryside that contextualises his drama in a waned industrial England.
The crackle of verisimilitude puts the then-recent Great Train Robbery in mind, and Johnny Douglas’s plaintive jazz score infuses the sodden, chilly, overgrown landscape behind much of the action with a melancholic vibrancy. After this Circus of Fear settles into a killer-on-the-lurk thriller, but the tension between the realism of Moxey’s style and the hoary thriller plot and formulaic fishing for red herrings is part of its appeal.
The dowdiness of the environs contrasts the gaudy appeal of the circus setting, and even that is quickly undermined as the circus returns to its winter quarters to await the Christmas season, and its bored denizens pass the time with murder, blackmail, and infidelity.
Determinedly low-key police detective Elliott (Leo Genn), in spite of being harried by his demanding boss (Cecil Parker) for a quick result in the case, investigates with dogged calm, trailing fragments of information into the English hinterland and finding not only Mason’s rotting body, but the conglomerate folk working for Barberini’s Circus, a perfect harbour for transients and strangers of all kinds.
An obvious candidate for villainy is the perpetually masked lion tamer Gregor (Christopher Lee), who conceals scars from a mauling in the ring; he possesses the suitcase Mason had brought the money in, hidden under the cage of one of his feline performers.
Ringmaster Carl (Heinz Drache) suspects Gregor might actually be Otto, father of Natasha (Suzy Kendall) who is training as a lion tamer herself, a wanted prison escapee who killed Carl’s father in a fight. Carl took a job with the circus specifically hoping Otto would come pay a visit to his daughter.
But whether or not Gregor’s the mastermind of the robbery soon proves moot as further murders occur, including that of the philandering Gina (Margaret Lee), partner of madly jealous knife-thrower Mario (Maurice Kaufmann), making Elliott suspect that the mastermind hasn’t yet found his lucre.
Manfred lurks menacingly, and the killer can only be identified by his trademarked throwing knives. Meanwhile Gregor is being blackmailed by Mr Big (Skip Martin), a circus dwarf who is nonetheless an accomplished bully and lecher.
As it turns out, Gregor really is Otto, but when he’s caught out and forced to flee the circus, he ironically argues to Carl that the killing of his father was accidental convincingly enough so that Carl lets him flee. But the mysterious killer causes Otto to fall to his death over a cliff, memorably wreathed in a shower of pound notes falling from his broken suitcase.
This is the sort of film I like not so much for what it’s about, as for the quality the filmmaking exudes, succinctly moody and enjoyably modest. Casting Lee more for his voice, trying on a plummy Germanic accent as his eyes blaze out through the holes in his mask for much of the film, than for his familiarly haughty good looks, was an original touch.
Wallace’s works were incessantly popular particularly for German filmmakers in the ‘60s, and in keeping with that appeal, this film was a British-West German co-production, offering up rising Euro-stars Kinski and the two Lees (who weren’t related) amongst others well-known in continental cinema.
The cast is surprisingly splendid and eye-catching for fans of the era’s genre faces. Martin makes nearly as memorable a contribution here as he did in Corman’s Masque of the Red Death (1964). Circus of Fear was produced and written (under his usual pseudonym of Peter Welbeck) by nefarious cinema entrepreneur Harry Alan Towers, who was concurrently producing Christopher Lee’s series of Fu Manchu movies for Hammer, and both Kinski and Margaret Lee would later star in the Towers production of Jesus Franco’s Venus in Furs (1969).
Like Towers’ version of Ten Little Indians from the year before, Circus of Fear is suggestive of the developing giallo style of crime film, and young co-star Kendall would go on to star in Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970).
But Circus of Fear is very different from the lush perversity of the continental style, emphasising the humdrum in the innately colourful circus setting, amidst the generally unforgiving English landscape in winter; there’s no doubt about the season as the actors’ breath fogs in many scenes, Moxey’s eye casually describing the withered-looking elephants and other animals of the circus with revealing documentary plainness, all the gilt stripped off the circus fantasy world just as he elsewhere casually reveals a world that seems to be decaying.
The film shares not just the setting but the theme of the masked escapee hiding amidst the circus folk with Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1953), to which this plays as the deglamourised riposte.
A recurring theme of inheritors dealing with the sins and failures of their fathers calls to mind City of the Dead; just as Natasha and Carl are struggling with poisoned legacies, so too it emerges that the mastermind is likewise driven on by paternal loss, so that his motives, as proven when he kills Otto, is finally less about money than enjoying toying about with people like fate incarnate.
In a nice twist, what seems to the film’s designated comic relief character, Eddie (Eddi Arent), the circus accountant repeatedly seen desperately trying to impress his fellows with circus tricks so as to be allowed to perform, is actually the killer. He is soon hoist by his own petard as Mario’s knife-throwing skills, which he mocked, proves in the heat of the moment quite good enough to take him out. No classic, but modish good fun.