Summary
The director Oldřich Lipský was a big fan of the circus. This was evident in his very first film, a comedy titled Cirkus bude! (The Show Is On, 1954). He returned to his favourite venue several times, whether in the documentary Cirkus jede (The Circus is Coming, 1960) or in the comedies 6 medvědů s Cibulkou (Six Bears and Cibulka, 1972) or Cirkus v cirkuse (Hurly-Burly in a Circus, 1975). He did not live to see the realisation of his dream project, the Cirkus Humberto TV series (1968), for which he wrote the screenplay. Cirkus v cirkuse was thus Lipský’s farewell to his beloved ring. The screenplay for the Soviet-Czech project was written by Miloš Macourek, who combined the performance of the Moscow circus, which Lipský had studied with the loving passion of a documentarist, with a fantastic story about a congress of zoophilologists. The British scientist, Dr. Whistler (Iva Janžurová), ventures that if her Czech colleague Professor Růžička (Jiří Sovák) can teach an elephant to sing, she will eat her hat.
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