(1952/Paramount Pictures) DVD / VHS
Rave Reviews
“The all-time weirdest, screwiest, funniest Best Picture Oscar winner. … A three-ring hootfest!"
—Edward Margulies and Stephen Rebello, Bad Movies We Love
“A huge, mawkish, trite circus movie … [a] cornball enterprise."
—Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
“The worst film ever to win Best Picture … hammy performances … overheated narration … cheesy special effects [and] a hokey script!"
—Brian Koller, e-Opinions.com
Plot, What Plot? A master at putting together all-star extravaganzas that played off religion, Americana, or both, Cecil B. DeMille was Hollywood’s consummate showman from the silent era through his death in 1959. This luridly colorful, shamelessly overacted circus spectacle, which actually beat out High Noon, Ivanhoe, The Quiet Man, and John Huston’s Moulin Rouge to win 1952’s Best Picture Oscar, is often cited as the worst movie ever to win that coveted award. It was also one of DeMille’s biggest successes.
Elephantine in its scope, and minuscule in its efforts to be about anything more than exploiting its circus setting to milk countless moments of pathos, Greatest Show has among its cast some of the most respected names in movies at the time. James Stewart spends most of the film behind hokey clown makeup, hiding a “desperate secret." Brassy Betty Hutton is an aerialist with designs on fellow high-wire risk-taker Cornel Wilde. Dorothy Lamour, Gloria Grahame, and Henry Wilcoxon, among others, are also members of the circus troupe, and stalwart, stodgy Charlton Heston is in charge of it all. Almost from the moment the film begins, the hokum sets in—and doesn’t let up until the big train-wreck climax. Essentially a big-budget soap opera, this is what passed for mainstream entertainment back in the days when TV first began encroaching on movie ticket sales.
“You don’t have anything but sawdust in your veins!" angry Hutton tells huffy Heston when he informs her that she’s lost the center ring to newly hired aerialist Cornel Wilde. Before anyone can say “elephant pucky," Wilde makes his big entrance accompanied by cop cars, vainly checking out his appearance in his sports car’s rearview mirror. “He may be a god in the air, but he’s a devil on the ground," Heston warns Hutton. She, being the mature adult that she is, immediately decides to play off Wilde against Heston, just to see what happens.
The consummate “ladies’ man," Wilde agrees to a friendly rivalry with Hutton to stir up business, then tries to bed her down besides. While cavorting with Hutton atop a bale of hay, and comparing her to champagne bubbles, Wilde is interrupted by one of Gloria Grahame’s performing elephants, which rescues Betty from a fate worst than death. But fate is stalking this circus nonetheless, as Wilde takes his midair antics to a new level, attempting to dive through a flaming, streamer-strewn hoop 100 feet in the air, without a net. As a horrified audience watches, Cornel’s stunt backfires, and he plummets to the sawdust below, mangling one of his arms in the process.
As Wilde tries to tell Hutton the good news that he may regain the use of his crippled hand, the train on which the circus is traveling (apparently made by Lionel Toys) collides with a car on the tracks. A spectacular wreck ensues, with circus folks tossed every which way escapes by lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!), and Heston pinned under the wreckage. Turns out Wilde is the only blood donor who can offer Heston a blood transfusion, Stewart (still in clown makeup) is the only doctor who can save Chuck, and Betty’s pluck and determination are the only thing that can rally the circus folks to give an open-air performance in a field to create a big finale.
Filmed in now lurid-looking Technicolor, peopled with characters who speak like stick figures in dime-store novels, and utterly predictable from start to finish, Greatest Show is perhaps the greatest example of just how gullible audiences were half a century ago. It not only won 1952’s Best Picture Academy Award, it was crowned the year’s box-office champion as well, hauling in over $14 million for Paramount, back when many theatres were charging less than 25 cents for admission. As P. T. Barnum once observed, “There’s a sucker born every minute!"
Dippy Dialogue
DeMille’s voice-over, describing the circus parade following the train wreck: “Scars covered by greasepaint, bandages hidden by funny wigs, the spangled Pied Piper limps into town."
Choice Chapter Stop
Chapter 10 (“On the Ground"): In which Hutton’s “purity" is preserved by a circus elephant with excellent timing.
Fun Footnote
Greatest Show won its Best Picture statuette during the 1953 Oscars—the first ever seen on live TV.
; Screenplay by Frederic M. Frank, Barré Lyndon, and Theodore St. John; From a
story 
by Frank, St. John, and Frank Cavett