Like so many Hollywood stars of the 1950s, John Wayne decided to turn producer (in partnership with Robert Fellows) to develop his own films, and not just acting vehicles for himself. Ring of Fear (1954) is one of the Wayne-Fellows productions that the Duke didn't star in, a high concept circus picture that is as much a stunt as a movie: part thriller under the big top, part Technicolor circus spectacle. It plays like a low budget knock-off of The Greatest Show on Earth (1952, or more specifically, one of that film's odd subplots) reworked as a revenge thriller with a tough-guy attitude. DeMille's hit movie, made with the participation of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, squeezed in a weird subplot about a lovesick elephant trainer (Lyle Bettger) with a creepy intensity, an unspecific Eastern European accent, and an unhealthy fixation on a girl that drives him to a fatal act of sabotage.

Sean McClory (Them!, 1954) takes the psychotic obsessive role here as Dublin O'Malley, a former ring director whose Irish brogue has a sinister undertow that sounds more Iron Curtain than Emerald Isle. O'Malley was scarred (in more ways than one) by a tiger while working for The Clyde Beatty Circus years before and the humiliation left him with a murderous grudge and a psychotic obsession that landed him in the State Mental Institution. What's a schizophrenic psychopath to do but break out to execute his revenge on circus owner and big cat trainer Clyde Beatty (playing himself) and get back the beautiful aerialist (Marian Carr) he still loves obsessively?

John Wayne buddy and longtime scribe James Edward Grant directs, reportedly with an uncredited assist by William Wellman (another Wayne pal and director of the hit The High and the Mighty, 1954), and shares screenwriting credit with Philip MacDonald (Rebecca, 1940) and Paul Fix, one of Hollywood's most prolific character actors. Given all that experience, you might expect Ring of Fear to make more sense than it does. The contrivances that bring O'Malley back to ringmaster duties in the big top, right after blackmailing an alcoholic clown into causing a series of near-fatal "accidents" (Wild tiger on the loose! Rope burned through with acid!), are developed with all the finesse of an elephant stampede. And when business manager Frank Wallace (Pat O'Brien in cigar chewing, hard-boiled mode) suspects sabotage, he brings in pulp novelist Mickey Spillane (also playing himself) to investigate. Why? Why not? It makes as much sense as anything here.

Grant had previously directed Angel and the Badman (1947), one of John Wayne's most underrated western dramas, but there is little of that film's consistency or intimacy here. He resorts to distractingly grainy stock footage for audience shots, clumsily reuses parade and performance footage, and makes a hash of editing a scene between Spillane and McClory, failing to match almost any of Spillane's nervous movements from shot to shot. And he isn't much for creating tension or cranking up the thrill factor, though he stages O'Malley's opening getaway, leaping between moving trains, in a single set-up that makes the stunt all the more impressive. That becomes the standard operating procedure for all of the circus sequences, where Grant makes the most of the CinemaScope widescreen. He shoots entire acts in long, unbroken takes to verify the authenticity of the spectacle, whether it's the trapeze act or Clyde Beatty in the lion's den. That's where Beatty shows the grit and glory that made his fame: alone in a cage with a half dozen unleashed lions, armed with a whip, a gun, and a chair he uses to parry and prod his roaring brood into a state of passivity. The act wouldn't pass animal rights protection today, but it's downright nervy stuff to see in what is practically a documentary record of his real-life circus act.

The resulting film, with its wildly inconsistent acting styles and loopy dialogue (just sample this one priceless line, delivered by Pat O'Brien to Marian Carr: "I'm sorry, we just got the news that Dublin is a kill-happy maniac"), borders on camp classic. Grant plods gracelessly through the mystery portion of the story, thanks in part to the stunt casting of Beatty (who can't read a line with conviction) and Spillane, who at least has fun playing himself (he's a street-smart wise-guy spouting lines that would be at home in his own novels – he reportedly provided some of his own dialogue). The heavy lifting in the acting department is left to O'Brien, all urban street smarts and snappy remarks, and McClory, who plays the conniving psycho for all it's worth, his attenuated brogue making a threat of almost every line. Their performances seem all the more exaggerated next to Beatty and Spillane.

Marian Carr cuts a curvy figure as blond bombshell trapeze star Valerie St. Dennis, the object of O'Malley's obsession, but she makes little impression here and her career (which includes supporting roles in The Devil Thumbs a Ride [1947] and Kiss Me Deadly [1955]) ended a few years later. The official comic relief is left to John Wayne regular Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez (Rio Bravo, 1959) as a wrangler who tries to win a spot in the show by (among other things) boxing a kangaroo (and losing). Ring of Fear weaves so wildly between comedy, circus spectacle and psycho thriller that you can never be sure where it's going. That's part of the fun of this loopy collision of genres mixing it up under the big top. The greatest show on earth it ain't, but it does know how to entertain.

Producer: Robert Fellows,
Director: James Edward Grant, William A. Wellman
Screenplay: Paul Fix, James Edward Grant, Philip MacDonald
Cinematography: Edwin B. DuPar
Music: Paul Dunlap, Arthur Lange
Film Editing: Fred MacDowell
Cast: Clyde Beatty (Himself), Mickey Spillane (Himself), Pat O'Brien (Frank Wallace), Sean McClory (Dublin O'Malley), Marian Carr (Valerie St. Dennis), John Bromfield (Armand St. Dennis).
C-93m.

by Sean Axmaker