Fantastic!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Brad Braden (played by Charlton Heston) is the manager of a circus. The circus is his life and everything else is secondary. The next most important thing to him is Holly (Betty Hutton), a trapeze artist, but she realises she will always take second place. Then Brad hires a world-famous trapeze artist, The Great Sebastian (Cornel Wilde) and Holly is bumped to second place in the trapeze act. The Great Sebastian has a reputation as a womaniser and Holly soon falls under his spell. Entertaining. This is Cecil B DeMille's homage to the Big Top and being a Cecil B DeMille movie means a massive production. No extravagance or expense is spared and the movie is incredibly grand in scale. We see and feel the size, wonder, enchantment and entertainment of the circus, it is that confronting.Plot is fairly average though. The main plot - the love triangle - feels overwrought and clumsy. Most of the sub-plots, especially the fraudster, feel silly and contrived. The only plot-line that was reasonably engaging was the Buttons the Clown one, and that had limited coverage.Narration is also off-putting, being overly dramatic and superlative-filled. It was like watching a WW2 propaganda documentary.Can't generally fault the performances though. Charlton Heston over-acts, but know to expect that. Betty Hutton is wonderful as Holly - bubbly, athletic and vivacious. And speaking of visual delights, there's Gloria Grahame... While being the biggest star in the movie, James Stewart, only has a supporting role. And his face is covered for the entire movie...

DeMille had a thing for big, epic movies. This one runs almost 2 1/2 hours. It features fictional stories overlaid on the real Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey's circus and in fact filmed at its winter quarters in Florida. Some of the scenes involved actual circus performances. This was a glorious time for traveling circuses, something that seems to pretty much faded from our history.Of particular interest to me are scenes in the movie, documentary in style, showing how the roustabouts erected the large tents, then later how they took everything down.This movie came out when I was only 6, I didn't see it right away but do remember seeing it when I was quite young. The most vivid scene that remained with me was the trapeze artist falling without a net. I saw it again today on the Movies! channel.A 30-ish Betty Hutton is Holly, one of the featured trapeze artists, when Cornel Wilde as The Great Sebastian is hired. Even though the two trapeze artists are competitive with each other, always wanting to try something more difficult, a love affair also blossoms. Then there is the fall that Sebastian takes, Holly blames herself for challenging him. When he returns from the hospital he seems fine but his right hand is paralyzed.Also 30-ish Charlton Heston plays the hard-driving circus master Brad Braden. Perhaps the most interesting role is James Stewart as a clown, we never see his face without makeup but his voice is recognizable as soon as he speaks. He is being hunted for a possible murder.

After first watching this on commercial TV 20 years ago, I just viewed this again on DVD just now. This is still pretty entertaining with some of the melodrama and especially that train crash near the end. Musical numbers by Dorothy Lamour-in which a couple of her famous co-stars from other movies make an audience appearance-and Betty Hutton with Jimmy Stewart joining the latter on a trampoline also are fun to watch. And some of the actual circus acts are pretty entertaining though they're better viewed in person than on film. But this is a bit overlong and somewhat old-fashioned and doesn't really deserve the Best Picture Oscar it got for 1952. That should have gone to the really creative Singin' in the Rain which wasn't even nominated in that category (nor was it for writing which TGSOE won for Original Story). Besides the stars I mentioned above, there's also Cornel Wilde, Charlton Heston, and Gloria Grahame to look forward to. Stewart appears in clown makeup throughout for a reason revealed near the end. Only a photo of him shown on screen has his more-familiar face. And producer-director Cecil B. DeMille's narration may be a little corny, but it still works for me. So on that note, I partially recommend The Greatest Show on Earth. P.S. While this film marked a reunion for a couple of stars from my favorite movie-It's a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart and Gloria Grahame-they hardly have any scenes together and rarely have dialogue between them.

A lot of people seem to have a problem with this film because it won 2 major Academy Awards, including Best Picture of 1952. I think critic Leonard Maltin may have put it best when he said that "like most of DeMille's movies, this may not be art, but it's hugely enjoyable".You have to begin by remembering that the year was 1952, Yes, Milton Berle and Lucy and Martin & Lewis had arrived, but only 34% of the homes in America had television sets. So, for many communities it was still a big deal when the circus came to town, and a big deal when a movie like this came to the local movie theater.Second, I think this film is important. In fact, probably more important today than it was in 1952. What better source do we have for seeing what a circa 1950 big circus was actually like? None. And make no mistake, despite a plot and movie stars, what you see in this film is a lot of real circus acts. Yes, for most you get only glimpses, but this movie still preserves what the mid-1900s circus was like better than any reference book.And what about the plot or plots. Well, you have a love triangle -- Heston, Wilde, and Hutton. You have the sub plot of how the mighty can fall (literally in this case). And you have another sub plot about revenge. Such plots and sub plots are not uncommon in pictures...in fact, they are the most common themes. Here they just happen to take place at a circus.In terms of the actors, this kind of part was perfect for the wacky Betty Hutton. If Lou Grant had known her, he would have said she had spunk! This is probably the only film I really like Cornel Wilde in. I guess the one who comes out pretty bad here is Charlton Heston. Of course, his greatest successes, including Ben-Hur, were a few years off. Frankly, his performance here is rather wooden and he shows his limitations quite profoundly. It's interesting to see James Stewart just clowning around...literally...in perhaps his most unique role. Dorothy Lamour is rather typecast. This may be the only film where Gloria Grahame acted like a normal human being...and did it quite well. Interesting, also, to see the venerable Henry Wilcoxon, her as the FBI agent. And the cameos are fun, including Bob and Bing.This really was quite a Cecil B. DeMille production. But, of course, DeMille was very old school, and it showed. And DeMille had yet one more miracle up his sleeve for a few years hence -- "The Ten Commandments".TO enjoy this film, remember the era which it represented, which was over 60 years ago. From that perspective, it's pretty damn good.