Trapeze, starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida, is 70 years old this year. In this article which first appeared in Yours Retro, Circus Mania author Douglas McPherson tells the behind-the-scenes story of how they made one of the greatest-ever circus films,
On 12 November 1859, Jules Léotard pulled on the skin-tight gymnastics garment that he had designed himself and which would forever be named after him. He stepped into the smoky spotlight of the Cirque Napoléon, a grand oval circus arena in Paris’ 11th Arrondissement. High above 5000 awed spectators he performed the first-ever routine on the flying trapeze.
Nearly 100 years later, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida convened in the same building, now renamed the Cirque d'Hiver, to make the greatest-ever film about the art form Léotard invented.
Trapeze, with its dizzying aerial work and stomach-churning plunges to the safety net, was a labour of love for Lancaster, who produced the movie with his agent Harold Hecht.
It was Lancaster’s love letter to his first foray into showbusiness as a circus acrobat in the 1930s. Touring with various big tops, he performed on the horizontal bars with his childhood friend Nick Cravat as Lang and Cravat until an injury forced his retirement from the ring in 1939 and he turned to an acting career.
Although Trapeze wasn’t autobiographical there were clear parallels with Lancaster’s life in the focus on the dynamics of a duo and a career ended by injury.
‘I’ve always wanted to do a picture about the circus,’ Lancaster said on The Ed Sullivan Show when the film was released in 1956. ‘I wanted to pay tribute to the world that I knew. So when Harold Hecht and I came across this story, we knew this was it.’
Hollywood had long been fascinated with the intrinsically colourful world of the circus. More than 30 big top flicks preceded Trapeze, including Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus (1928), the Marx Brothers’ At the Circus (1939), Disney’s animated classic Dumbo (1941) and most lavish of all, Cecil B DeMille’s Academy Award-winning The Greatest Show on Earth, which starred Charlton Heston in 1952.
So there was every reason to believe Trapeze would be another winner for Lancaster who had previously showcased his acrobatic ability on a ship’s rigging in an earlier Hecht-Lancaster production The Crimson Pirate (1952).
The truly international production was helmed by the then recently knighted English director Sir Carol Reed who was midway between his two most acclaimed pictures, The Third Man (1949) and Oliver! (1968) for which he won an Oscar for best director.
Filming took place in Paris in autumn 1955, almost entirely in and around the Cirque d’Hiver (which translates as Winter Circus) with additional interiors shot at the nearby Billancourt Studios, with a French crew.
Liam O’Brien and James R Webb’s screenplay was adapted from Max Catto’s 1950 novel The Killing Frost, but with major changes. The original gay subtext was never going to fly on cinema screens in the mid-Fifties. The book’s climatic murder was also omitted in favour of a happier ending.
The movie begins, to the stately strains of Johann Strauss’ waltz The Blue Danube, with Lancaster’s character Mike Ribble wowing a crowd on the flying trapeze. He completes a mid-air triple somersault but then plunges to the safety net and bounces onto the ground, sustaining a crippling leg injury.
After the title sequence, the embittered, limping, hard-drinking Ribble is working outside the spotlight, rigging equipment for other acts in the roof of the building.
Tino Orsini (Curtis) arrives in Paris, wanting Ribble to teach him the triple somersault, which is the Holy Grail of trapeze tricks. Ribble initially doesn’t want to know but is soon persuaded to form a new act, with him as catcher and Orsini as flyer.
A memorable street scene finds the two men walking on their hands, feet in the air, having an upsidedown conversation.
In the meantime, Lola (Lollobigida) is trying to get the circus owner to book her trampoline routine. The impressario has other ideas. He insists Lola join Ribble and Orsini’s fledgling act, setting the stage for a high-altitude love triangle.
Montgomery Clift was considered for the role of Orsini. But rising star Curtis proved to be the perfect foil for Lancaster’s old hand in the part of an ambitious performer on the brink of fame.
They’d first crossed paths in Criss Cross (1949) in which Lancaster starred and Curtis made his uncredited debut as a dancer. Since then, Curtis’ heart-throb looks had swiftly elevated him to leading roles in The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951) and Houdini (1953) in which he played the famed escapologist.
To ensure he’d look at home amid the trapeze rigging, Curtis spent four months with Lancaster at Cirque d'Hiver – literally learning the ropes – before shooting began.
‘Burt had that background. I didn’t,’ Curtis said. ‘But Burt was one of the finest men I ever knew and he made it possible for me to learn as much as I could in four months. We were at the circus every day, living in that environment.’
‘Tony was terrific,’ Lancaster told Sullivan. ‘He entered into the spirit of things with tremendous enthusiasm and vitality. He didn’t know a thing about circus work, but he caught on just like that!’ The actor snapped his fingers. ‘Things it took me years to learn, he picked up in a matter of days.’
Curtis and Lancaster got on so well making Trapeze that they immediately reunited for another of several films together in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
Lollobrigida was another up and coming talent with looks to kill. As Humphrey Bogart, who played her husband in Beat the Devil (1953), put it, ‘She makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.’
Because of a disputed contract that she signed with Howard Hughes in 1950, Lollobrigida was prevented from working in America until 1959 and had until that point made mostly Italian and French films, with Beat The Devil (shot in Italy) being her first English language movie.
The Italian actress was the perfect fit for Trapeze which authentically portrayed the typically wide range of nationalities found in a European circus.
On set she told a reporter from The Miami News that she was playing ‘a real bitch’.
Solid acting support was provided by Thomas Gomez as Cirque d’Hiver’s real life owner Joseph Bouglione. He looked every inch the showman-businessman with a cigar in one hand and a baby chimp cradled in his other arm.
A pre-Carry On films Sid James also looked at ease with a python wrapped around his shoulders as a Cockney snake salesman.
Real circus artists who provided background colour included celebrated French clown Achille Zavatta, the Codreanos from Portugal, Los Arriolas from Spain, a bear act from Germany and an equestrienne from Italy.
Perhaps the real star, though, was the Cirque d’Hiver. Unchanged since Léotard performed there, it dripped with circus history. From an arena full of rehearsing acrobats to stables full of plumed horses and a menagerie where tigers prowled in the background, every shot of the circus was as richly detailed as an oil painting.
Cinematographer Robert Krasker was responsible for making the centerpiece trapeze scenes so thrilling. Shooting from above in the rafters, and upwards from below the net, he fully captured the vertigo-inducing sense of height and danger.
When the film was released, much was made of Lancaster using his circus background to perform his own stunts.
‘To make it real,’ Lancaster said on The Ed Sullivan Show, ‘with all the excitement and tension it deserved, nothing could be faked. No movie magic. Everything had to be real. And it was.’
Coached by Eddie Ward Jr, who came from a longstanding trapeze family, The Flying Wards, Lancaster did almost everything except Ribble’s triple somersault. Fittingly, that stunt was performed by Lancaster’s old circus partner, Nick Cravat.
Lancaster and Cravat maintained a lifelong friendship and appeared in nine films together, beginning with the swashbuckling pirate adventure The Flame and the Arrow (1950).
Although Ringling Brothers circus trapeze artist Fay Alexander did the triple for Curtis (with Ward as his catcher), the actor did as many physical scenes as possible.
‘I felt they were integral to the part,’ Curtis said. ‘Having a double is like having someone else do your voice. When an actor can do as much of his own action stuff as possible, his body language stays the same. A double can’t do that.’
In a fencing scene in his previous picture, The Purple Mask (1955) Curtis was hit in the cheek by a sword.
‘I spat out a mouthful of blood and they didn’t even stop shooting,’ he told Clive James decades later.
Attesting to the danger of circus tricks, Lollobrigida’s first stunt double, Sally Marlowe, had to retire from the shoot after breaking her nose. Willy Krause took over. Some online articles claim an unnamed stunt woman died in a 40’ fall, but that is believed to be an internet myth.
The cutting between doubles and actors is slick enough to go unnoticed by anyone caught up in the drama and dazzled by the camera angles – although The New York Times’ eagle-eyed critic Bosley Crother noted a continuity error in his review: ‘Lollobrigida's double is seen flying through the air in a green costume. The next shot of the actress has her grabbing the hands of Mr. Lancaster and wearing a brown-and-white striped number.’
Well caught, Mr Crother!
Promoting the film on The Ed Sullivan Show, Lancaster did a handstand while Curtis clowned around.
‘What we’re all dying to know,’ Sullivan asked, “is what exactly has Lollobrigida really got?’
‘A husband,’ Lancaster and Curtis deadpanned in unison.
The critics weren’t universally impressed.
Crother’s scathing review in The New York Times dismissed the ‘dismally obvious and monotonous story’, and added, ‘Mr. Lancaster is dreary and Mr. Curtis is simply juvenile.’
Variety, however, called the flick ‘high-flying screen entertainment equipped with circus thrills and excitement. Reed’s direction loads the aerial scenes with story suspense for even more thrill effect.’
Distributed by United Artists to 400 US cinemas, Trapeze recouped its $4 million budget in its first week and went on to be the third highest-grossing film of 1956, with $15.5 million in the bank. In the UK it was the fourth most popular film of the year.
Lancaster won a Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Reed was nominated for best director by the Directors Guild of America.
Seventy years on, Trapeze remains compelling, if not so much for the overheated love triangle than the sumptuous visuals and thrilling acrobatics. You’ll quite simply never have a better night at the circus.
For more on Trapeze, click here to read my review of the DVD.
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