The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

 

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

 

You’ll love this film … also, it’s terrible.

 

Once it was one of the biggest successes in Hollywood history, this film is now mostly forgotten, or if its remembered, it’s only for people to mock it. “The Greatest Show on Earth” combines a remarkable joyousness with truly thunder-headed stupidity, terrific documentary footage and FX sequences with sappy and unconvincing melodrama, and it will simultaneously make you glad the fifties are over and wish you could have them back.

 

Legendary Director/Producer/Actor Cecil D. DeMille, one of the founding fathers of US cinema. His first released film, “The Squaw Man” (1914), also happened to be the first ever USA-made, feature-length, film. He was almost seventy-years-old when “The Greatest Show…” was released, and by then had about seventy features under his belt. During pre-production he over-worked himself, there were disturbing incidents where he looked as if he was going to collapse, and then fears this would prove to be his last film. Instead, it would prove to be his next-to-last, he capped-off his career with 1956’s “The Ten Commandments,” which would completely eclipse this one, and still remains (when adjusted for inflation) one of the top-ten highest-grossing films of all time.

 

I’m only familiar with DeMille’s sound films, more serious students of his work argue he peaked creatively during the silent era. Though till the end of his career he loved employing the most cutting-edge FX, in terms of style and narrative he became frozen in amber sometime in the early 1930s. That wasn’t all bad though, one of the great pleasures of even the worst DeMille films is the warm nostalgia they evoke, but from my reading, his sound films had that same comfy old-fashioned feeling even the day they were released. Several of his early films are also credited for being serious examinations of modern relationships and social issues, but he appeared to have abandoned those ambitions in the early 1920s, when he fell in love with epic film-making. Most of his career was distinguished by movies with huge casts and long running-times (this movie is two-and-one-half-hours), in which he offered us deliberately uncomplicated plots and characters buttressed by spectacle and grandeur.

 

During the arduous, year-long, process of getting a workable screen-story for this film (this is one of only a handful of his career that was an original screenplay, not an adaptation) there was a telling anecdote. According to Executive Producer Phil Koury, "DeMille's antics during this period were not of a kind to endear him to his writers. He flayed them in conference, then openly at staff luncheons. There were moments when he seemed close to panic. Costs were piling up. More than $50,000 had gone into writers' salaries. There were thick stacks of material. Conference notes, bits of plots and miscellaneous ideas - but nothing together into dramatic sequence.

 

“Then Cecil had an idea. Cecil's grandson, Jody Harper, was eight years old at the time and loved to watch films with his grandfather. 'When Jody says, "that's the bad man, grandfather", or "That's the good man," I know all is well with the story.' He told the staff at lunch one day. By this time five writers had been on the script and he turned to one and asked him to bring him an outline of a circus story that Jody could understand.”  

 

So, what DeMille approved, because even an eight-year-old could understand it, was a backstage drama about what it’s like to put on a circus. It focuses on the Manager, Brad Braden (Charlton Heston), who has an improbable plan to reverse the declining profits of a popular circus by extending the season, therefore increasing costs, and do more shows in smaller towns, where there’s less competition but also smaller audience bases than the big cities. It’s the kind-of can-do entrepreneurialism that films of that day often celebrated, but generally makes people who actually try to keep the books of other people’s enterprises cringe. Brad convinces us he will succeed though because of his boundless energy and deep commitment; we are told that he has “sawdust in his veins.”

 

He’s also willing to make personal sacrifices for business success. To generate greater public interest, he pisses off his headliner, who is also his girlfriend, Holly the Acrobat (Betty Hutton), by downgrading her in favor of a newly recruited star act, the Great Sebastian (Cornel Wilde).

 

Apparently, DeMille’s earliest films had strong feminist themes, but DeMille’s view of gender politics obviously changed some time after women got the Constitutional guarantee of the right to vote in 1920. Brad’s shabby treatment of Holly is supposed to demonstrate that he hasn’t lost sight of his masculine priorities, and while all the girls flock to his trailer, trying to seduce him by cleaning and making coffee, he growls, “Women are poison.” DeMille was, at least by then, a pretty hard-core Right-winger, and uses a lot of Cold War rhetoric in non-political contexts. He narrators the film himself, speaking of the circus as a “gigantic power …restless giant … fiercely primitive fighting force … mechanized army on wheels … moving in to capture a new city.”

 

Most of the plot complications are Sebastian’s fault, he’s an egotist and a cad and starts making moves on jilted Holly while at the same time inviting the renewed attentions of two of his exes who are now his co-workers again, an Elephant Rider, Angel (Gloria Grahame), and another Acrobat, Phyllis (Dorothy Lamour). Though most of the narrative real estate is devoted to the Brad-Holly-Sebastian triangle, the secondary triangle, Sebastian- Angel-Klaus (Lyle Bettger), a jealous Elephant Trainer has greater plot importance. This triangle sets up the climax when Lyle plots revenge against the circus with too-bit hood Harry (John Kellog).

 

Another sub-plot concerns a multi-state manhunt for a sympathetic wife-murderer (it was a mercy killing) and how that might explain why the film’s most sympathetic character, Buttons the Clown (Jimmy Stewart), is never seen without his makeup.

 

None of this is remotely believable or compelling, and mostly the performances are terrible because mostly the dialogue is even worse. As a recent Critic, Matt Medlock, wrote, “Mammoth production dwarfs taste, restraint, art and intelligence; there’s not a character or sub-plot to care about whether they’re in the air or on the ground.”

 

Heston gives the best performance, his charisma and vibrant masculinity shine. He wasn’t that big a star before this and his lead casting on such an expensive production raised a few eyebrows, but he became an instant marque idol upon its release, and was again tapped by DeMille for the role of Moses in “The Ten Commandments.”

 

Also endearing was Stewart, the biggest name on the cast list at the time the film was made. It was surprising he allowed his face to be covered throughout the film, but he actually lobbied for the part, loving the idea of being in a circus movie.

 

Unfortunately, almost everyone else, though very pretty, are also pretty annoying. Graham especially grates, and she was usually a hell of an actress, she even picked up an Oscar that same year, just not for this clap-trap (“The Bad and the Beautiful,” unfairly un-nominated for Best Picture).

 

Among the sequences that hold up best today are several that are non-fictional, lovingly demonstrating mechanics of raising the big-top, moving the massive menagerie, etc. The death-defying performances are beautifully captured, and Editor Anne Bauchens, a long-time DeMille collaborator, flawlessly integrating the Actors, several of whom trained extensively for the physical aspects of their roles, and the real Circus Performers taking over the most dangerous stuff. There’s also an impressive train wreck (again, mostly successful because of Bauchens’ smoothly editing live actors and animal in with miniatures), baby gorillas, dogs riding horses, and a priest surrounded by a gaggle of altar boys blessing the animals.

 

The film is not set in a fictional circus, the name Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey is emblazoned everywhere; their performers mixed with the Hollywood stars on-screen and did much of the stunt-work; almost half this film is an advertisement for that famous traveling show more than it is a narrative film. Product placement has always been part of cinema (the very first winner of a Best Picture Oscar, “Wings” (1927), prominently product-placed a Heresy Bar), but this was an extreme version of it. Weirdly (to me) is that the circus didn’t help finance the film, in fact, Paramount Pictures had to pay $250,000 to the circus for the right to make the circus look good.

 

Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey sadly closed forever in 2017, after a 146-year-run, because of declining audience interests, rising costs, and accusations of animal abuse. It was a once beloved form of entertainment that time left behind, not unlike DeMille’s film-making mannerisms.

 

“The Greatest Show…” was made for $8 million and pulled in $12.8 million in USA and Canada alone, making it the highest-grossing film of its year, and that doesn’t include also being the most popular film in Britain, France, and God knows how many other countries. It ran for a record 11 weeks at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall Movie Palace, and would hold the title for decades, perhaps to the end of the institution itself. Like the circuses, the movie palaces are largely gone, Radio City dropped the movie-palace business model in 1979, and after closing for renovations, reopened more focused on live performances.

 

Contemporary reviews were mostly positive, but mostly acknowledge how stupid the film was. Time Magazine stated, “The Greatest Show on Earth … is a mammoth merger of two masters of malarkey for the masses: P. T. Barnum and Cecil B. de Mille.” Variety wrote that the film "effectively serve[s] the purpose of a framework for all the atmosphere and excitement of the circus on both sides of the big canvas." Dennis Schwarz at the NY Times was positivity gushing, “It is difficult to be certain, in the case of ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ whether Mohammed has gone to the mountain or the other way around … the bright magic that is in it flows from the circus as it was photographed for real. One of them must have done the honors. We honestly can't tell you which. But this we can tell you for certain: two American institutions have combined to put out a piece of entertainment that will delight movie audiences for years.

 

And it had a song, by John Ringling North, who has a cameo in the film, he waswas a nephew of the five Ringling brothers who founded Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and was its owner at the time.

 

“The Greatest Show…” was nominated six Oscars, winning two, Best Picture and Best Story, neither of which were deserved and remain controversial till today. It lost in the categories of Best Director, understandable giving the mawkish silliness of the proceedings, but in the other three categories, Best Editing, Costume Design, and Color, it deserved the Oscars far more than it did the trophies it went home with.

 

There are two explanations for “The Greatest Show…” receiving greater-than-deserved honors, and the explanations are not mutually exclusive.

 

Before then, DeMille was never honored as he should’ve been, and he was getting on in years, so like when the repeatedly snubbed Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo Del Toro who got their Oscars for their lesser films (“Django Unchained” (2012) and “The Shape of Water” (2017) respectively) this was more like Lifetime Achievement Award than a statements about a specific work.

 

Another reason was the ugly side of Cold War politics in the USA. Since 1947 Hollywood had been publicly pillaring, ruining the careers of, and sometimes jailing, many of their greatest talents just because they were viewed as politically impure. Though 1952 was a spectacular good year for Hollywood, it was also a dark and scary one, and many of the clearly superior films seemed to be dogged by the McCarthyistic Witch Hunts and Blacklisting (note: though Sen. Joe McCarthy is the eras most famous villain of this intolerance but the  real hammer of official persecution was the House Unamerican Activities Committee, which McCarthy had no role in, and a number of private Citizens, Journalists, Actors, and Producers, who had both access to the bully-pulpit and a bone to pick). The much-beloved “Singing in the Rain” went shockingly un-nominated for Best Picture, maybe because the lead, Gene Kelly, was constantly under the threat of being Blacklisted, and the actor’s real-life wife, Betsy Blair, already was. Another unnominated, but superior, film was “Viva Zapata!” which likely ran afoul because the screenplay was started by Lester Cole, who was dropped from the project when he was Blacklisted, finished by John Steinbeck, under constant threat of being Blacklisted, and directed Elia Kazan, who was dragged before HUAC the same year the film was released, threatened with the Blacklist, but instead saved his career by betraying his friends. (With other, unfairly un-nominated, films from that year, “The Bad and the Beautiful” (which still, today, holds the odd record of most Oscar wins without a Best Picture nomination), “Park Row,” “With a Song in My Heart,” and “Monkey Business,” I see less clear political motive.)

 

Two of the other nominees beaten out by “The Greatest Show…” were “Ivanhoe” and “High Noon,” and were both likely sidelined because both had scriptwriters, Marguerite Roberts and Carl Foreman respectively, who were victimized by the Blacklist while the films were in production. True, another superior nominee, “The Quiet Man,” featured Right-Wing-icon John Wayne as the lead, was overlooked, but likely there was a backlash against Wayne personally; Wayne clearly made enemies because of the Satanic glee he took in destroying the, until then, popular Foreman, the even more beloved Dalton Trumbo five years earlier, and God knows how many others he personally targeted. (A final, better nominee, “Moulin Rouge,” was also passed over, with less clear political motive.)

 

More contemporary reviews are, well, hesitant. Leonard Maltin opined that "like most of DeMille's movies, this may not be art, but it's hugely enjoyable." And the “The Official Razzie Movie Guide: Enjoying the Best of Hollywood's Worst” listed this film.

 

 

In this case, DeMille was as staunchly Right-Wing as Wayne, demonstrated by his hostility to Unions and was a leading member of the National Committee for a Free Europe, but even after embarrassing himself in an attempt to unseat Joseph Mankiewicz from the Presidency of Screen Directors Guild in 1950 (because Mankiewicz opposed loyalty oaths), DeMille seemed not to have pissed off nearly as many people as Wayne did.

 

And this film has an undeniable legacy. DeMille was (then) the most financially successful Director/Producer in Hollywood history, a mantle now held by Steven Spielberg. “The Greatest Show…” just happens to be the first film Spielberg ever saw in a theater and he was mesmerized, he credits it with inspiring him to pursue his own film career. The train-crash sequence especially impressed him, and he has that playing on the TV in the background of a scene in “War of the Worlds” (2005), which he Directed, and it is homaged in a “Super 8” (2011) which he Produced.

 

Trailer:

 

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers - YouTube