Plot Intro
Brad Braden (Charlton Heston) runs his spectacular travelling circus with a cool head and a protective nature. In order to secure a whole season’s worth of shows from his financiers, Brad hires an infamous trapeze artist, The Great Sebastian (Cornel Wilde). Unfortunately, this irks Brad’s girlfriend, Holly (Betty Hutton), who is also an aspiring acrobat and wanted the centre ring for herself. Holly and Sebastian begin a competitive but flirtatious relationship in the big top that could jeopardise Holly’s relationship with Brad- and her life. Meanwhile, a popular clown named Buttons (James Stewart) is revealed to have a Deep Dark Secret…
The Greatest Show on Earth is generally hailed as one of the least deserving Best Picture winners ever. Empire named it alongside Cavalcade and Braveheart amongst it’s top ten Oscar fails. Many people have put its win down to the voters avoiding voting for the bigger competitor, High Noon, an outstanding low-budget western starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, dealing subtly with the McCarthy witch-hunt happening in American politics at the time. Instead of being controversial, the Academy voted for a big-scale, stunt-heavy spectacle involving bickering circus hands, elephants, and small dogs in funny hats. In other words, a safe option.
Bearing in mind that High Noon and another film released in 1952 that didn’t even get a nomination for Best Picture, Singin’ in the Rain, have both surpassed it in notoriety, does The Greatest Show deserve the criticism it receives? In my opinion, no - this is a feast for the senses! It’s a welcome return to the ambitious opulence of the '30s epics, but with the character-driven dramas of the ’40s mixed beautifully into it. We will see more of this blend as the decade rolls on.
Many elements of the film made me recall 1936’s winner, The Great Ziegfeld, which had a storyline interspersed with some of the most garishly over-the-top dance sequences known to mankind. The Greatest Show follows a very similar structure but what makes it better than Ziegfeld is not just the fact that the colours further enhance the scale of the circus performances, but many of the performances work hand-in-hand with the action. Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde end up competing against each other on the trapeze in an escalating series of suicidal stunts; a woman puts her head under an elephant’s foot, but the elephant is being controlled by her possessive lover who knows she loves another man; one stunt goes horrifically wrong leading to the audience seeing the tragic side of circus performances; and Buttons’ clownish antics are used to disguise a quick conversation with his mother in the audience. While there are some song-and-dance segments that are put it to fill up time, many of them develop the characters or the action with great skill.
Also, Buttons’ storyline is extremely touching. I won’t reveal what his Deep Dark Secret is, but it is displayed with a nuance and tenderness that beautifully contrasts the grandeur and ostentatiousness of the bulk of the film. This is our second and last encounter with James Stewart on the Best Pictures list, but I would strongly recommend any of his films (particularly Rear Window and Mr Smith Goes to Washington), because he conveys vulnerability and tragedy like no other actor.
On a negative note, I do wish the main storyline involving Charlton Heston and Betty Hutton had a similar level of tenderness - it is overshadowed horribly and comes across as too theatrical and bromidic mostly due to Hutton’s melodramatic expressions. But despite this, The Greatest Show is a lot of fun, has touching moments, and captures the stress, furore and excitement of circus life very well. If you want an insight into what circuses were like before the RSPCA got involved, then look no further.
Highlight
A terrifying series of trapeze stunts between Holly and Sebastian led to Doug and I screaming “She’s gonna die!” at the TV screen.
Lowlight
Betty Hutton is great on a trapeze but I was underwhelmed by her acting. It’s like someone told her to move and shout a lot and hope for the best.
Mark
8/10
I don’t have any knowledge of High Noon, the film that most movie buffs say should have nabbed the Oscar this year, but having seen The Greatest Show On Earth, I find myself surprised by the full-on disparaging and snooty attitudes towards this extravaganza of colour and circus life. From the beginning, this sets out to almost be a documentary, capturing the life of circuses as they were then - with some melodramatic plot thrown in for good measure. A whole section shows how they assemble the Big Top in each new location, while many of the performers actually hailed from circuses and were brought in to lend some truthfulness to the scenes.
When I first heard that this was a film about circus life, I hoped that there would be plenty of circus scenes as I grew up loving the circus from our sporadic visits to touring Big Tops, and boy does it deliver. There’s dancers, parades, acrobats, clowns, and perhaps more controversially (now, anyway), dancing horses, elephants, lions, tigers, bears (oh my) and a horde of dogs wearing hats that make them look like tiny elephants. And as Paul has pointed out, what is great about this film is that the characters’ and plots’ developments are woven through these performances. Two women bicker over the same man, while dressed as 18th century women, smiling forcedly at the audience and hissing angrily at each other. The death-defying nature of the aerial stunts performed by Holly and Sebastian are terrifying in themselves, but the fact we know the characters are competing against each other means that we don’t know how far they will go to ‘win’ - adding another layer of tension.
I particularly liked the use of the two and a half hour run time to slowly develop characters. One man who begins as a comically jealous wannabe-lover, ends up getting darker, and more aggressive, until he ends up precipitating the final catastrophe of the film, twisted by his love. It makes no attempt to hide the full-on and passionate emotions that surely run freely through any circus, as they do in theatre, dance and all art settings. Gloria Graeme deserves a nod for her turn as the dissatisfied circus performer who tries to escape this jealous lover, and has a wonderful scene where she attempts to charm the circus owner into loving her.
Overall it’s a lot of fun and you’re never bored, which given its lengthy run-time is impressive. I loved the generous time allocated to showing the circus acts, and am still bowled over by how much more lively colour makes cinema. I might have liked The Great Ziegfeld a hell of a lot more had it been in colour…
It’s fascinating to see circus acts and performances, and the well-written story woven around it with suitably crooked salesmen, a tormented clown and aerial performers who cannot bear to be out of the heights is gripping. The ‘50s are turning out some cracking films so far…
Highlight
I loved the array of circus life on display, and the fact that over sixty years later, these acts are still as exciting and tense as they are today. Also I loved the clown emerging from the tiny clown car. How?!
Lowlight
An odd one, but I found the scenes where the elephants and horses were made to dance quite uncomfortable and verging on upsetting. Still, a sign that we’re a more enlightened world today?
Mark
7/10
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