The Clyde Beatty Circus comes to town, and in a B-movie montage faintly echoing Cecil B. De Mille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), boxcars uncomfortably crammed with elephants, camels, and other animals are unloaded, an old-fashioned circus parade marches through some unidentified city's downtown district, and the narrator extols the joys of the Big Top.

Meanwhile, over at the State Mental Institution (Maximum Security Division), convicted and emphatically Irish felon Dublin O'Malley (Sean McClory) appears before the parole board declaring, "I'm telling you I'm not crazy! I'm as sane as any man here!" In movie terms this is surefire evidence that Dublin is completely nuts. Further, Dublin loses it after being shown a photograph of old flame and circus aerialist Valerie (Marian Carr), and before you can say "schizophrenia" Dublin escapes, eventually making his way to Beatty's Circus. Wanting to keep a low profile, Dublin gets a job as the circus' ringleader.

In addition to obsessing over Valerie, now married to fellow aerial artist Armand (John Bromfield), Dublin is seeking revenge against Clyde Beatty (Clyde Beatty) for allegedly humiliating him in a lion's cage. Blackmailing alcoholic clown Twitchy (Emmett Lynn) to help him, Dublin plots to cause a few "accidents" in the ring.

After several close calls, do Beatty and circus executive Frank Wallace (Pat O'Brien) call the cops? Of course not - they call on bestselling pulp novelist Mickey Spillane (Mickey Spillane) to solve the case!

Ring of Fear was directed and co-written (with actor Paul Fix) by James Edward Grant, a longtime pal and collaborator of Wayne's whose best films (Hondo, Sands of Iwo Jima, Circus World) tended to be collaborations or adaptations. His worst scripts (Big Jim McLain, The Barbarian and the Geisha) are usually original screenplays and often downright awful.

Ring of Fear is neither subtle nor logical. When a sabotaged safety rope nearly kills the famous lion-tamer, a newspaper headline, in 20-point type, blares, "Clyde Beatty In Brush with Death!" at which point Dublin, disappointed, sneers, "Next time, Beatty!"

As a director, Grant is much worse. His only other credit, Angel and the Badman (1947), isn't bad, but one suspects that film's very hands-on star, Wayne, almost certainly guided that Republic production through its paces. Left to his own devices, Grant's work on Ring of Fear is at times amazingly amateurish. The film is such a mess some scenes with comic relief Pedro Gonzales-Gonzales appear to have been added late in production, almost as an afterthought, to bridge the herky-jerky material which has notably awkward transitions from one scene to the next.

Grant was also extremely sloppy during the editing phase. He uses the same parade footage over and over, so that as Beatty's Circus moves from town-to-town, it parades past the same small-town businesses again and again. Late in the film, a confrontation between Dublin and Spillane is distractingly funny because of its wild lack of continuity. Shot from several angles, Mickey's arms keep changing position, with the lightning speed of Bruce Lee.

It would be interesting to learn more about what must have been a troubled production. William A. Wellman reportedly stepped in and directed some footage, while Kenneth Tobey, who had starred in The Thing just three years before, appears in what's practically a bit part (two short scenes with not more than three or four lines) in Ring of Fear's final cut. (He's billed 10th in the credits.)

All this ineptitude is actually pretty entertaining, however, and the film does deliver in terms of slam-bang action and B-movie spectacle. Its circus footage of real acts functions as a great historical record of one of the leading 20th century American circuses. Though by today's standards its treatment of some of the animals is very politically incorrect, there's no denying that Beatty's act is singularly impressive and dangerous-looking. The film's credits amusingly bill all of the acts that appear in the film.

It's unfortunate that the film spends so much time with Dublin and his demons, because it's fun to watch non-actors Beatty and Spillane. For a dramatic feature of the '50s, all the in-jokes and references to real personalities are surprising; it's a shame they don't have more to do. (Both played themselves in other fiction films, and Spillane even appeared as his own creation, Mike Hammer, in the enjoyable 1963 British film The Girl Hunters, an early 16:9 DVD release.)

Video & Audio

Ring of Fear is a Paramount release that thankfully retains the original Warner Bros. logo at the head and tail. The 16:9 transfer is very good, but the technical limitations of early CinemaScope and WarnerColor are apparent. (Warner may have also used its inferior in-house anamorphic lenses, if memory serves.) Still, this is probably about as good as Ring of Fear is ever going to look, and it's not bad. The English audio is offered in both a 2.0 and 4.0 Surround mix that retains the great directional dialogue and sound effects. Optional English subtitles are included. There are no Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

Ring of Fear is part of that peculiar sub-genre of circus-in-peril movies that includes Circus of Horrors (1960, the best of the genre) and the similarly-titled Circus of Fear (1966). For classic movie fans looking for something offbeat, this comes Highly Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.