The Greatest Show on Earth

The Greatest Show on Earth is generally regarded as the worst film to ever win the Best Picture Oscar. I had never seen it before yesterday, and I can now verify that it deserves this dishonor. It is a bloated, mawkish, corny spectacle with some tin-eared dialogue, community-theater level acting, and stagnant direction. It's victory in 1952 is one of the great mysteries in Academy Award history.

There are clues, though. The Cecil B. DeMille circus epic was the highest grossing picture of '52. After the nominations were announced, the odds-on favorite was High Noon, which was a thinly-veiled allegory attacking the pall of McCarthyism in America. It's writer, Carl Foreman, was a hostile witness to the HUAC committee. DeMille, on the other hand, was a Hollywood institution and an ardent anti-Commie. Perhaps that was all there was to it.

The film takes a look at the behind-the-scenes drama of the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus (John Ringling North has a cameo as himself). Charlton Heston is the manager of the circus, a "show must go on" type who has "sawdust in his veins." His sweetheart is Betty Hutton, the star trapeze artist, but she has to play second fiddle to new star, an Italian lothario, Cornel Wilde. There is also a subplot involving James Stewart as a clown who never removes his makeup because of a secret in this past.

To watch this movie today is to see something that is horribly dated. The circus doesn't have a place in American culture today, except for the many Cirque du Soleil shows that bear little resemblance to the three-ring show that was put on under the bigtop in small towns for generations. I would imagine that little children of today would find the wonders of the old-time circus to be very boring. In 1952, when movies were challenged by television, it paid off to make spectacles that couldn't be reproduced on the small screens of primitive television sets, and thus we get films like this, which had long scenes that were nothing more than gaudily costumed circus performers parading around a ring.

When the parades stop and there is story, it's hackneyed stuff. Any movie that has the hammy Heston saying things like, "You two crazy fools" is bound to be bad. He's not the only culprit--Hutton is awful, and Wilde is a caricature of Italians. Stewart is the only saving grace of this nonsense. He might have made a really good clown, and his story is poignant. If the movie had been about him it would have much more interesting.

The big set piece at the end of the film is a spectacular wreck of the circus train. With today's special effects, it looks like exactly what it was--a wreck of toy trains. Doing a little research I discovered that even back then there were critics that thought this scene looked cheesy. DeMille would top it a few years later with his parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.