It’s rarely available on the boob tube, but since Turner Classic Movies has dedicated several nights in January to the films of Elia Kazan, it has aired Man on a Tightrope, his 1953 film (to me, a classic) based on Neil Paterson’s 1952 novel about a Czech circus escaping to the West from behind the Iron Curtain. It stars Fredric March, Gloria Grahame, and charter NR subscriber Adolphe Menjou (here’s a scene in which Menjou plays the Commie bureaucrat who gets consumed by the secret police). It’s one of Kazan’s lesser-known films, but one of the few that Hollywood made that directly focuses on the despair and bleakness of a Workers’ Paradise. As a film it has its flaws, but one any conservative should want to see — and if you have TCM on your cable system, you have a few days left to catch it on demand.

Jack Fowler is the vice president of National Review . @jackfowler