Billy Rose's Jumbo (1962)

 

Billy Rose’s Jumbo doesn’t particularly break any new ground as a movie about a poor, small circus, but the depictions of everyday life among the circus performers and the performances themselves are stunningly shot and worth the couple of hours the story takes to unspool. “Pop” Wonder (Jimmy Durante, playing a usual Durante role) gambles away every day’s profits, leaving his daughter Kitty (a luminous Doris Day) to try keeping the circus afloat by asking for extensions from the many, many creditors the Wonder Circus has accumulated. Jumbo, an entertaining elephant, is the star attraction of the circus, and he’s wanted (very badly) by a rival circus. Enter Stephen Boyd, an enigmatic high wire acrobat who turns out to be the son of the owners of that rival circus. While he’s wooing Kitty (and having his singing voice dubbed in doing so), he’s also paying off the Wonder Circus’s rapidly mounting debts and acquiring larger and larger shares of its ownership. That’s really about it for the main plot, honestly, so the thinness of the story leaves generous amounts of time for watching the circus acts themselves. One of the centerpieces I especially enjoyed is a stunning number involving women dressed as butterflies. Unfortunately, a storm interrupts their part of the show, and the circus has to spend some time recovering and rebuilding from all the damage. The other highlight of the movie are all the lovely songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, most of which have nothing to do with the circus. Still, it’s hard to argue when you have Doris Day singing “My Romance” and “Little Girl Blue” and “This Can’t Be Love.” There’s even an astounding nine-minute musical number at the end entitled “Sawdust and Spangles and Dreams,” a sort of circus fantasia, if you will. Day, of course, sings beautifully, but the filmmakers do surround her in pink an awful lot. A less “girly” color palette would have suited her better. One of the other pleasures of the film is watching the great Martha Raye mugging her way through one of the broadest performances of her career – and that’s saying a lot. She plays a circus performer who’s in love with Pop Wonder, and watching her get shot out of a cannon is a sequence you won’t soon forget.

Oscar Nomination: Best Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment