- Overview
In search of a better life, a German girl named Willi joins an American carnival passing through Munich. While traveling from town to town, she is torn between two suitors: cruel carnival barker Joe and kindhearted high-dive artist Frank. Frank gets the upper hand when he asks Willi to join his act. The partners soon become the most popular attraction at the carnival. But tragedy is only a slip away.
- Release Date
16 April 1954
- DirectingKurt Neumann
- Budget
$0.00
- Revenue
$0.00
- Stars
Videos
User Reviews
See moreJohn Chard
16 May 2024
You will go wherever I tell you. Kurt Neumann directs Carnival Story, starring Anne Baxter, Steve Cochran, Lyle Bettger, George Nader and Jay C. Flippen. Music is by Willy Schmidt-Gentner and cinematography by Ernest Haller. Set in Munich, Germany, plot centres on the workings of Grayson’s travelling carnival. The perils of love, infatuation and high diving acts come crashing together. Filmed in Agfacolor/Technicolor and unfurling its narrative in a carnival atmosphere, Carnival Story is pleasing enough on the eyes and ears. That is once you get used to Baxter’s German accent that is! Willi (Baxter) is the fulcrum for everything that happens, caught picking the pocket of carnival worker Joe Hammond (Cochran), she ends up getting employed by the owner Charley Grayson (Flippen). From there she starts to literally rise up the ladder of success whilst indulging in a torrid love triangle with Joe and Frank Collini (Bettger). The temperature never gets above lukewarm settings, the narrative getting bogged down by a repetitiveness that grates entering the last third of film. There’s much swooning and sexual discord, but it never steams the screen up, this in spite of Cochran’s animal magnetism and Baxter’s natural sexuality. While Flippen is under used and Bettger unsuited to the role of a swim trunk wearing high diver. It’s all a bit flat in story telling terms, even the ending fails to close pic down with thrilling wonder. A missed opportunity here, but fans of Cochran doing bad boy are well served, as are those of us who have lusty lustations for Annie Baxter. 5/10
CinemaSerf
21 November 2022
Maybe not a film Anne Baxter will look upon whilst compiling a list of her top ten films. She plays "Willie" who runs away to join a circus in Germany where she quickly learns the ropes, rising to become the star turn. Meantime, she has fallen for the rather ruthless owner Steve Cochran ("Joe") but is also quite keen on acrobat Lyle Bettger ("Frank Colloni") whom she marries - then tragedy strikes! It's actually quite an entertainingly filmed piece of melodrama - if you don't impose 21st century attitudes to 1950s circus acts (and some mean knife-throwing); but there is little to redeem the really rather hammy acting and terribly lacklustre storyline - and Baxter's Germanic accent wouldn't ever have to worry Marlene Dietrich! A colourful nostalgia piece, but not much more.
More Like This
The Sawdust Paradise
She dances- The Dance of Death. She Sings- The song of Life. Scintillating, Fascinating, Desirable, Swifty She Weaves the Web of Destruction and...
See more
The Rum Diary
Tired of the noise and madness of New York and the crushing conventions of late Eisenhower-era America, itinerant journalist Paul Kemp travels to...
See more
Paper Moon
A bible salesman finds himself saddled with a young girl who may or may not be his daughter, and the two forge an unlikely partnership as a...
See more
Alaaf - 200 Jahre Kölner Karneval
200 years of Cologne Carnival! The most colourful and loudest festival in Cologne celebrates a big birthday. In February 1823, a few men from...
See more
Nightmare Alley
Roustabout Stanton Carlisle joins a traveling carny and unsuccessfully schemes to figure out the mind-reading act of Mademoiselle Zeena and her...
See more
Kehraus
Ferdinand Weitel, a forklift driver, is desperate: Insurance agent Arno von Mehling, a true sales talent, has had contracts signed in record...
See more
Two Moon Junction
A young Southern débutante temporarily abandons her posh lifestyle and upcoming, semi-arranged marriage to have a lustful and erotic fling with a...
See more
An American Crime
The true story of suburban housewife Gertrude Baniszewski, who kept a teenage girl locked in the basement of her Indiana home during the 1960s.
See more
Carny
Tired of being a small-town waitress, Donna departs with the latest carnival show, living with entertainers Frankie and Patch in a tense, emotional...
See more
The Unholy Three
A trio of former sideshow performers double as the "Unholy Three" in a scam to nab some shiny rocks.
See more
Carnival Magic
A magician in a carnival--who actually can read minds and levitate people and objects--works with a superintelligent chimp named Alex, who can also...
See more
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
After a chance encounter with a wanted man, a woman is harassed by the police and press until she takes violent action.
See more
Freaks
A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him...
See more
Some Came Running
A former novelist returns to his small Midwest town after serving in the Army during WWII, to the chagrin of his social-climbing brother, and...
See more
Nightmare Alley
An ambitious carnival man with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words hooks up with a female psychologist who is even more...
See more
Fox and His Friends
Fox, a former circus performer, wins the lottery of DM 500,000 and can now have the life and things that he has always wanted. While he wants to...
See more
Sixteen
Hickspoiltation film from the early 1970s ostensibly starring Oscar nominee Mercedes McCambridge, but really more a film looking for an excuse to...
See more