Some documentaries, when you first read about them, don’t sound like your cup of tea at all and Fortune’s Wheel, a story about a lion tamer from Fairview in the fifties, wasn’t one I would rush out and see. But director Joe Lee delivers a solid documentary on Bill Stephens, a circus man savaged by his own lion.
Fortune’s Wheel would actually make for an interesting film. It has all the ingredients. A backstory about an odd boy whose interest in animals and reptiles made him standout. There’s humour, like his marriage to a woman from ‘the east’ when that east turned out to be East Wall. There is his ambition to be like his hero Clyde Beatty, a famed American lion tamer, and his attempts to bring his act to the States only for funding to set him back. His creation of the character ‘Captain’ Bill Stephens, complete with safari outfit and hat. There is the dedication and love for his lions, nursing back to health a sick lioness by sleeping with her in her cage for a week in the winter cold, waking several times in the night to roll her over so she wouldn’t suffocate. And his ill-fated decision to buy a lion he was advised against because it was ‘a killer’, and the tragedy that befell him when he was attacked and killed by that lion just as he was auditioning his act to a big American circus.
Fortune’s Wheel takes on the structure of pub stories, tales someone might regale over a pint: Did you hear the one about the lioness that escaped its cage and prowled through the backstreets of Fairview in 1951? In another moment that would make for a cracking film sequence, Lee tracks down those who experienced those terrifying moments - Bill Stephens'attempts to bring her under control, and his begging of the Gardaí not to shoot as she was his livelihood - and lets the talking heads do the work.
Other interviewees include Tom Duffy of Duffy’s Circus and Herta Fossett, a former trapeze artist and the Czechoslovakian wife of the late Edward Fossett of Fossett Brothers Circus, and both prove to be engaging speakers.
