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256 Yes, Mr. DeMitte Fields: "Some day the is going to be crushed under one of his own epics/* The time was at hand! Hollywood had never made an honest- to-goodness circus picture under the Big Top itself with circus people. Technically, it had posed fantastic problems. Dramatically, it would be the sheerest folly; circus stunts like flying and the "iron jaw" routine were usually not to be found in any Holly- wood actor's bag of tricks. Thus, it would require too many phony shots—"long" shots of performers substituting for the principals. So-called circus pictures like Chad Hanna (with Henry Fonda) and Laugh, Clown, Laugh (Lon Chaney) had merit because they accomplished what they set out to do within nar- row limits, but in no real degree did they mirror circus life. This was even true of that granddaddy of circus classics, Variety, with Emil Jannings, and such lesser efforts as Halfway to Heaven (Jean Arthur, Buddy Rogers), The Mighty Barnum (Wallace Beery, Virginia Bruce), and Sally of the Sawdust (Carol Dempster, W. C. Fields). Other producers, sensitive to public taste, also had rummaged around in literary sources only to discover there was precious little to choose from in the way of circus fiction. Like DeMille, they did not want to photograph a sentimental memoir. They saw what he saw in the circus—"A fighting machine, a thing struggling against accident, flood and storm"—but up to this point they had refused or were unable to pay the price a true- life circus drama would exact. As the following months proved, the diagnostic slurs of critics had not taken into account DeMille's most potent strain, his fighting spirit.