I'll tell you why so serious

As Good As It Gets

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I finally saw this film on you tube recently.It was very sharp excellent print.Unless my memory is fuzzy,I think I had saw it on television too,I had not seen it since I first saw it at the state theater in 65, in El Paso Texas.This was not a road show print .It was mono and regular scope.The Irony is we had the Capri theater that showed Cinerama ,but it did not premiered there.This later version ,I saw, a road show print ,restored from the Technirama original negative.It had intermission music , for some reason in mono sound.Enter Acte music and exit music.It was very entertaining,but not John Wayne's best.Some time the voices got out of sync .The Polka music in the Celebrating for getting the tent party,by Dimitri Tomkin,Sounded exactly like the same music used in the fair sequence in ,"Friendly Persuasion.This better print sounded a lot better than the theatrical mono print.The story is just fair ,not great.You never understood why the ship tipped over all of sudden.This was created to take advantage 8 Perf 35 mm Technirama wide film and for the effects of the artificial Cinerama presentation.Bronson believed in spectacle in his films ,but at the cost of common economical sense,which led to his downfall as a producer,when he began to loose money on his films.One thing is you never saw Purdey character at the Colonel Purdy's wild West show.You never know who sent that article about The Death of Toni Alfredo's father to Toni and who started the fire,Was it Conti's character?that was another problem in the film.In spite of it all it was still worth watching.Too bad a Blu- ray version wasn't available on the u.s. 09/11/16

. . . and it obviously was aimed at the impaired prostate crowd, with all of its entrance music (for last minute leaks), intermission scoring (for mid-stream relief), and exit tunes (for guys who just cannot wait another second). But CIRCUS WORLD star John Wayne chose his projects carefully (no, he's NOT the killer clown, as you might guess), and he was sharp enough to realize that if half the geezers with one foot in an old folks home Ponied up to see this flick, he'd be able to corner the market on Panamanian shrimp (which he did, in Real Life). If you told a bunch of screenwriters the plot of CIRCUS WORLD, they'd tell you that it would be a real stretch to pad out such thin material to as long as a 90-minute film. But "Il Duce" never had any truck with people who could communicate in complete sentences, so he stubbornly insists here upon chewing up a lot more than he bit off during a grueling 143 minutes. My party was laughing hysterically as Wayne's "Matt" character shinnies up to the peak of the Big Top to save "Lili" from an inferno. Because even if CIRCUS WORLD had been a million years longer, Matt would still be trying to get off the ground!

Just to set the record straight, this movie was shot in Super Technirama 70 (which is just Technirama but called this when shown in 70mm).This is a format with 8 perforation horizontally moving camera negative like VistaVision but with a slight anamorphic squeeze to take in a full Scope-like frame. It can be printed with an additional squeeze to render CinemaScope-compatible 35mm 4-perf prints with greater sharpness due to the double-sized camera negative (intermediate and print stocks can carry a great deal better resolution as they do not need to be as "fast" as camera negative) and billed as Technirama. Or unsqueezed and printed onto 70mm and billed as Super Technirama 70.And, yes, it was officially a Cinerama film. No, not what most of us would call "real" Cinerama with the triple camera and three projectors but Cinerama owns the trademark and can apply it to anything they wish. Just as IMAX slaps their name on crappy digital projection nowadays.

I watched this, for the first time since it was in theatres when I was 10, on YouTube in HD720 letterboxed at 2.20:1 on my internet-capable Blu-Ray player - the picture quality was outstanding. It was a different kind of role for Duke and, despite the obvious fact that it's not one of his or Hathaway's best, I found it enjoyable for a variety of reasons. Besides Wayne, there's Claudia Cardinale, John Smith whom I remembered from "Laramie" and one of my favorites, Lloyd Nolan. Not to mention Rita Hayworth. I enjoyed Jack Hildyard's beautiful photography and wish more films had been photographed in Technirama - it was such a versatile format, very high quality like VistaVision. I didn't let the picture's script shortcomings bother me - for my money (none!), they just didn't matter - or the probable fact that, if all it took to capsize a ship at the dock was a bunch of people rushing over to the side rail, it never would've survived an ocean crossing. Heck, it's make-believe, and it has ample verisimilitude to satisfy me. Just kick back and enjoy it.