Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. The Greatest Show on Earth is the twenty-fifth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. Over a quarter of the way through the process of watching every Best Picture winner, you begin to pick up on some patterns of what appealed to the voters in those early days. A crucial trait that frequently appealed to the Academy was spectacle. Few films are a more bombastic showcase of wonder and amazement than Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth.
Brad Barden (Charlton Heston) is manager of the famed Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey circus. Still a staple of mass entertainment, costs and poor pre-sales have the board wanting to cut down the season to just ten weeks in the big cities. In order to save a full season of work for his troupe and the wonder of the circus for small towns across the country Brad brings on The Great Sebastian (Cornel Wilde) a notorious — and notoriously troublesome — acrobat to anchor the show’s center ring. From there we see the circus tour from city to city and the entangled lives of the performers as they put on show after show, day after day. Betty Hutton plays Holly, the acrobat displaced by Sebastian. She and Brad are a couple but she becomes soured when his devotion to the show overshadows his loyalty to her. Elephant trainer Klaus (Lyle Bettger) and performer Angel (Gloria Graham) are a fiery pair but Klaus’s unwanted and spurned advances threaten the whole production. Then there’s Buttons the Clown (James Stewart) a genial but mysterious figure, beloved by the troupe but clearly hiding something beneath his ever present face paint. For a film of nearly three hours, The Greatest Show on Earth is pretty sparsely plotted. The main piece of story revolves around a love triangle between Brad, Holly and Sebastian. Mostly, the film focuses on the spectacle of the circus. We see acts and performances in full. Sometimes that is the dueling acrobatics of Holly and Sebastian, but more often it is the entirety of a themed parade or a horseback riding routine. By far the most interesting moments revolve around Buttons, who clearly adores the circus but is also using it as cover for some dark part of his past. As the film progresses we learn more about what happened but his remains a minor thread of the broader story. When The Greatest Show on Earth works best it is in this same sort of portrait of the types of people drawn in to circus life. Holly expressing the thrill and romance she feels flying through the air or Brad’s passionate defense of the show as a last bastion of wonder for small town children. Unfortunately the emotional experiences are too often drowned out by the sheer scale of the film and institution it depicts. DeMille pours a great deal of attention into the machinations of the circus operation. The laborers who perform the gargantuan task of raising and felling the big top at every stop get a special shoutout. Costumers and animal trainers are shouted out alongside performers at every turn. Very clearly there is an admiration for every bit of effort poured into putting on a spectacular show. A generous gesture to those behind the scenes but one that takes a great deal of focus from the dramatic pulls of the story. What all this adds up to is hours of circus performance threaded with a light story. It is occasionally insightful and sparingly entertaining depending on how interested one is generally in big top acts. The animal performances are uncomfortable to watch with modern mores, as are the stereotyped parades, even Barnum and Bailey have excised those cruel staples of circus presentation from their modern shows. All the rest feels like it would play better on the ground than on the screen, a depiction of the greatest show on earth rather than an exploration of it. The Greatest Show on Earth is engaging enough to hold attention but never insightful enough to feel truly warranted. It’s not hard to see how the spectacle of the thing appealed to contemporary audiences, especially those who lived far from train tracks that would have brought the circus to them. There is a certain “the show must go on” spirit here that always appeals to creative types. Still, in capturing the wonder of the circus, DeMille fails to mine the drama inherent to the unique souls that make it their life. 6/10
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