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Topic: I just found out I own a movie theater
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
![](http://www.film-tech.com/ubbmembers/534a.jpg)
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 07-02-2016 12:28 AM
quote: Bill Brandenstein RE: The Smallest Show on Earth (1957) - IMDB lists this here as "Big Time Operators" for some reason. DVD request placed through my local library.
It was very common for British films to be renamed, and extensively re-edited, for their US release, especially in the '40s and '50s.
One geeky sidebar about Smallest Show. In one of the closing scenes, Peter Sellers is reminiscing about what he considered to be the glory days of British cinema, and shows a reel of [url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comin%27_Thro_the_Rye_(1923_film)]Comin' Thro' the Rye[/url] as an example. This must have been a film industry in-joke, because this movie is, by ALMOST universal consent, about the worst ever to emerge from a British studio. The tragedy is that it was the final film of a pioneer of British cinema, Cecil Hepworth, who, from around 1895-1905, was the Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg of his day, but only a decade later had been totally overtaken by events and was living firmly in the past. Comin'... was his final, megabudgeted production before his company went bankrupt. He was basically using the same story structure, acting and directing style in 1923 as he was in 1903.
I say that the movie is a dog by ALMOST universal consent, because about the one detractor is an academic who also happened to be my professor in film archiving school. At the time, he'd just written a book that tried desperately to rescue the film's reputation: he made us watch all the surviving footage from it over and over again (the last reel is lost and I can't say that I'm overjoyed at the others surviving!), and in seminars was clearly disappointed that no-one in the class agreed with him that he'd rediscovered an unjustly neglected masterpiece.
But yes, Smallest Show is absolutely worth a look.
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