1952 was basically Cecil B. DeMille’s last chance to produce and direct an Oscar contender. He had already done his Biblical epics and had a long history of making prestige films both in silent cinema and afterwards. Rather than go back to another religion story or period drama,he decided to focus on a modern-day spectacle, the traveling circus. He used his sense of epic visuals and cinematic showmanship to bring to the screen the very real spectacle of Barnum and Bailey’s Ringling Brothers Circus, complete with many of the actual performers of that traveling show putting on a performance like you would find under the real big top. The result, while epic in length, is middling and runs on for far too long. It took home Best Picture, but that feels like a lifetime achievement Oscar than a legitimate reflection on the finished product.
The film’s story is pretty bare-bones. What it boils down to is that Brad Braden (Charlton Heston) manages the world’s largest railroad circus. The show is in danger of being trimmed down to a short 10-week season unless ticket sales justify keeping it going a full season. To make sure it turns enough of a profit to keep the tents open and keep the performers employed, Brad is forced to hire world-famous aerialist “The Great Sebastian” (Cornel Wilde) despite knowing it will force his girlfriend, Holly (Betty Hutton), out of the center of the ring, making her no longer the center attraction. Holly, naturally, is upset at the downgrade and is determined to out-perform Sebastian and earn her way back into the center ring. This leads to a series of performances where the two compete in adjacent rings, each showing up the other in increasingly dangerous feats. Sebastian, a notorious womanizer, starts to pursue Holly, and she begins to reciprocate, pulling away from Brad, whom she sees as always putting the circus before her.
While this is going on, Harry (John Kellogg) runs the Midway concession for the circus. When he is caught cheating customers, Brad fires him and throws him out on his backside. Furious at the way he was cheated, Harry, who has connections in organized crime, vows to get revenge on the circus. This storyline culminates in an act of sabotage that endangers the lives of everyone and everything working for the circus.
The third and final main storyline involves Buttons the Clown (James Stewart). Buttons never appears outside of his makeup. The reason for this becomes clear early on when his mother attends one of the shows and makes it known to him that the police are still looking for him and are on his trail. Before working for the circus, he was a doctor but is now wanted for his role in the mercy killing of his wife. His knowledge of first aid and medicine gives him away to Brad, though, who observes his actions and puts two and two together. Brad gives Buttons the opportunity to lie low and escape when the FBI makes it known that they will be fingerprinting everyone in the troop until they find their man.
There are other, minor stories throughout, but these are given little time and really amount to nothing more than padding to an already overstuffed production. Setting all of this within the confines of a traveling circus adds a sense of magic to the proceedings. However, it doesn’t take long before that magic wears thin and the spectacular becomes overly familiar. The saying goes, the first time you see a death-defying act, it’s exciting. The next time you see it, it becomes commonplace. The third time it becomes boring. That goes double for movies. Seeing Holly and Sebastian doing their aerial acts is fun at first, but it grows old quickly. There is a later scene where Holly is going for a world record, the audience excitedly cheering and counting along as she repeatedly flips herself, with just one arm, up and over on her lift rope. The number gets up over a hundred, and, as dangerous as this act is, no audience would still be excitedly counting well into the hundreds. Repetition breeds boredom.
This goes for all the rest of the acts, too. There are only so many times we can watch people on tightropes, or dogs riding on the back of horses, before it just becomes too much. Yet scenes like these go on and on throughout the entire film. We also get lengthy sequences of the raising of the tents, covered in a documentary-level of detail. This style is further reinforced by a narrator who opens the picture with “This is the Circus.” Throughout the next 150 minutes, we will see the ins and outs of circus life and the realities of being in a traveling troop like this. This may be fascinating to some people but others will just find it tedious and repetitive.
When I was in grade school, my aunt and uncle took my siblings and me to see Barnum and Bailey’s circus courtesy of free tickets they handed out every year in school. It was the one and only time I ever went to the show. This would have been in the mid-1980s, and I swear some of the acts haven’t changed in all those years. This is a show that, until recently, hadn’t modernized much since its inception. What was magical to a ten-year-old boy just isn’t all that exciting to a middle-aged man, despite what this film would have you believe. We get glimpses of excited adult patrons peppered in, some of which are celebrity cameos, trying to make the acts feel more exciting than they actually are. Even when something goes bad, like when Sebastian finally pushes things too far and is seriously injured, the effect is ruined by the camera lingering on the actual accident for a second too long, revealing the mystery of how it was filmed.
Steven Spielberg has cited this film as the one that got him interested in making movies. He even uses the climactic train sequence in his film The Fablemans, an autobiographical picture of his childhood and ascension into filmmaking. There’s no denying the effectiveness of this scene; it’s horrific to watch even if some of the effects are dated. I remember seeing this for the first time over twenty years ago, not knowing it was coming, and being shocked by the wanton destruction brought on by the anger of one man vowing to get even for a personal slight. Cecil B. DeMille may have been at the end of his career, but he still knew how to stage an exciting set piece. If only the rest of the picture lived up to this moment.
The Greatest Show on Earth is a bit of a misnomer of a title. It refers to what the circus is calling itself, which may be an accurate description if you were there to see it live. Seeing this movie, though, this title just doesn’t represent the experience. None of the personal dramas feel worth the time invested, and James Stewart, the best part of the film, is limited to hiding behind the makeup and dishing out little tidbits of his backstory without enough detail to make it more than mildly interesting. It’s a film about the circus, but it drowns us in details and overwhelms us with scene after scene of the same acts, tweaked a little, but the same nevertheless. It makes for an overall uninteresting film that didn’t deserve the Best Picture Oscar. That award should have gone to High Noon, but at the time, the Hollywood blacklist had tagged several key individuals involved with that film, ensuring it wasn’t going to win, even though it was easily the better picture.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Motion Picture: Cecil B. DeMille (won)
Best Director: Cecil B. DeMille
Best Story: Fredric M. Frank, Theodore St. John, and Frank Cavett (won)
Best Costume Design - Color: Edith Head, Dorothy Jeakins, and Miles White
Best Film Editing: Anne Bauchens
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Release Date: January 10, 1952
Running Time: 152 Minutes
Not Rated
Starring: Betty Hutton, Cornel Wilde, Charlton Heston, Dorothy Lamour, Gloria Grahame, Henry Wilcoxon, Lyle Bettger, Lawrence Tierney, Emmett Kelly, Cucciola, Antoinette Concello, and James Stewart
Directed By: Cecil B. DeMille
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