The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) Review

A circus manager is told the season will be cut short unless he makes it profitable. He hires a European trapeze star, which demotes the woman he is involved with, and the two performers begin competing at increasing risk while a train carries everybody between towns.

The 4 is for a documentary with a plot glued to it. The circus footage is genuinely valuable, the acts are real performers doing real work, and everything constructed around them is filler of a quality DeMille would not have accepted from a writer twenty years earlier.

It is also the entry on this page where the argument requires no effort at all. High Noon is on this site, is eighty-five minutes, and is one of the ten best American films.

It won two awards in total, for the story and for editing, which for a Best Picture winner is a remarkably thin haul. The same ceremony handed High Noon four awards, including Best Actor for Gary Cooper, Editing, Score and Song, which means the film that lost Best Picture went home from that same room with twice as many.

The Circus Footage Is Real

DeMille shot with the actual Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey company, on tour, using their performers, their equipment and their logistics.

That material is the film’s only lasting value and it is considerable. The tent being raised, the train being loaded, the parade, the acts themselves, and a documentary record of an industry that no longer exists in this form.

The teardown is better than the setup. A performance ends and the film follows the company dismantling everything and loading it in sequence, and the footage of a town-sized operation disappearing overnight is the best thing in the picture.

The specificity is what makes it worth keeping. Eight hundred people, a hundred railway cars, a schedule, and the film spends real time on how a circus physically moves from one town to another overnight.

Anybody interested in that should watch the first forty minutes and the train sequence and stop. The performers are the film and the actors are the interruption.

DeMille narrates it himself, in the first person, over the opening, which tells you what the production thought it was making. A director introducing his own film as a document is not describing a drama.

He was also two years from The Ten Commandments, which is the film the career is really remembered for, and this win sits awkwardly between a body of work and its best-known entry.

The Plot Is Assembled From Parts

Brad manages the circus. Holly loves him and resents the demotion. Sebastian is arrogant and skilled. Angel wants Brad. Phyllis wants Sebastian. A clown has a secret. There is an embezzling concessionaire.

None of that is developed. Each strand gets scenes, none of the relationships changes in a way that follows from character, and the resolutions are delivered by events and not by decisions.

The trapeze rivalry also resolves off a physical accident instead of a decision, which is the film’s habit. Almost everything that changes in the plot changes because something breaks or somebody falls.

Charlton Heston is fine and the part is a function. Brad is competent, is married to the circus, and says so repeatedly, and that is the entire characterization across two and a half hours.

Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde get the trapeze rivalry, which is the one thread with any tension, and the film converts it into a romance in the final act, which removes the only stake it had established.

Gloria Grahame and Dorothy Lamour are both in it and neither has anything. Grahame had won Supporting Actress the same year for The Bad and the Beautiful and is here handling an elephant, and Lamour sings a number and disappears for an hour.

James Stewart in Makeup

Stewart plays Buttons, a clown who never removes his makeup, which the film establishes early and explains in the last twenty minutes.

It is the film’s one genuinely good idea. A man hiding inside a costume in a business full of costumes, in a travelling company that does not ask questions, and Stewart plays him as gentle and permanently watchful.

The makeup rule is also established properly. He is never seen without it, including in the sleeping car, and the film sets that up early enough that the audience has stopped noticing by the time it matters.

The reveal is that he is a doctor wanted for the mercy killing of his wife, and a police officer has been travelling with the circus looking for him all season.

What the film does with that is nothing. He is exposed, he saves a life, he is arrested, and the film treats it as a subplot resolution and not as the tragedy it had constructed. A better film is visible inside that material.

Stewart was also at a strange point in his career, two years past Winchester 73 and Harvey, taking a supporting part under heavy makeup in somebody else’s spectacle. He took the job because DeMille asked, by his own account.

The Train Crash

The set piece everybody remembers is a deliberate derailment, staged with real rolling stock, at considerable expense, about two hours in.

It is well executed and it is enormous. Carriages overturn, animals escape, and the sequence runs for several minutes with genuine scale and no process shots for most of it.

The animal footage in that sequence is genuinely uncomfortable to watch now for reasons the production would not have considered, and the film treats the escaped cats and the panicking horses as spectacle.

What it lacks is consequence. The circus performs the next day, the company recovers, and the crash functions as a spectacle followed by a demonstration that the show continues, which is the film’s stated theme and its least examined one.

That one sequence contains the film. Enormous resources, real skill, no dramatic result, and a return to the status quo with a speech about the circus going on.

Heston also does the sequence with a genuine injury, having been thrown from a vehicle during the staging, and the footage of him being carried is real. That kind of detail is the only thing in the second half with any weight to it.

High Noon

Best Picture in 1953 went to this. The other nominees were High Noon, The Quiet Man, Ivanhoe and Moulin Rouge.

Spielberg has said repeatedly that this was the first film he saw in a cinema and the reason he became a director, and he recreated the train crash in his own work more than once, which is the clearest evidence of what a child takes from a film regardless of whether the film is good.

High Noon runs eighty-five minutes in near real time, is a McCarthy-era allegory about a town refusing to help a man who has protected it, and won four awards including Best Actor for Gary Cooper and Best Editing. It did not win Picture or Director, and Zinnemann lost to John Ford for The Quiet Man.

The political context is documented and is part of the explanation. Carl Foreman wrote High Noon, was called before the House committee during production, refused to name people, was blacklisted, and left the country. A vote for that film in 1953 was a statement and a vote for a circus picture was not.

DeMille was also on the other side of that argument publicly and was a central figure in the industry’s anti-communist activity, which is context the record keeps and which nobody discussing the result can reasonably ignore.

Should you watch The Greatest Show on Earth?

The first forty minutes and the train sequence. A genuine documentary record of a circus that no longer exists, one good idea about a clown who never removes his makeup, a derailment with no consequences, and the least defensible Best Picture of the studio era.

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