Rent The Smallest Show on Earth (1957)

Charming Comedy. - The Smallest Show on Earth review by Steve

Short, nostalgic comedy which honours the long history of local British cinemas, just as many were closing down or being converted into bingo halls. A nice middle class couple inherit and restore a small, dilapidated fleapit and begin to show films again despite many comical and sentimental complications.

The cinema building was adapted from the Victorian theatre and Edwardian music hall, and there is an impression of an evolving cultural tradition in jeopardy. And there is the warmth that comes from people doing work out of the love of things.

Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna don't have much sparkle in the lead roles, despite being married in real life... The heart of the film is the support characters played by Margaret Rutherford, Bernard Miles and a greyed up Peter Sellers, who are the eccentric, long standing staff of the old picture house.

There's a beautiful scene when the old timers watch a silent film on the big screen, transfixed and united by reminiscence and the magic of celluloid. There are no big laughs. It's a wistful, gentle film which laments the local cinema as it slipped out of fashion.

Hilarious classic - The Smallest Show on Earth review by CP Customer

For the older generation, a trip down memory lane with some great stars. Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna were a fine teaming - they later co-starred in "Born Free". What a hilarious place to put a cinema! Very enjoyable.

CINEMA PARADISO - The Smallest Show on Earth review by Frank Talker™

A gentle and often farcical epitaph for the local British cinemas of the past before the soulless multiplexes arrived to replace them; leaving us with only the occasional art-house venue to indulge our love of the seventh art. In this case, the "Bijou Kinema" - an 'electric theatre'.

The plot is light and mostly a collection of sight gags about what going to the pictures used to be like: Snogging in the back row, rushing to get-out of the cinema when the national anthem played at the end of the day, girls selling choc-ices from trays wrapped around their necks, cinema commissionaires, etc.

Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna play the married, collective straight-man of this comedy while Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford & Bernard Miles play the mostly-warring character parts - all as old and as decrepit as the fleapit that they love. These three performers render absurdity and pathos indistinguishable by making their distinct characters and their distinctive acting-styles work perfectly together. They are, in fact, the main reason for watching this movie.

A scene summing-up the film's essence occurs when the three elderly-staff watch an old silent-movie, after hours, with one playing piano accompaniment - as affecting a scene as anything to be felt in "Cinema Paradiso" (1988). (The film they watch is "Comin' Thro the Rye" (1923), starring Alma Taylor, who makes an uncredited appearance here as a patron of the competitor cinema.)

Although wreathed in nostalgia, the film's realistic ending betrays the realisation that bigger businesses will almost always inevitably be swallowed-up by the smaller ones, although it does this via the commission of a serious, imprisonable & aggravated criminal-offence!

The film does not waste any of its brief runtime on soppy love-stories since the romance depicted here is for the far-less-messy love of film, itself.