Characteristically elephantine Big Top epic from DeMille, thumped across with a winning brashness and garnering the veteran showman his first Best Picture Oscar.
1 Comment
06/24/06
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
41 %
Reviews Counted: 22 Fresh: 9 Rotten:13 Average Rating: 5.3/10
Consensus:
The Greatest Show on Earth is melodramatic, short on plot, excessively lengthy and bogged down with clichés, but not without a certain innocent charm.
Runtime: 2 hrs 32 mins
Synopsis: THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH is a dazzling, only-by-DeMille spectacle of life behind the scenes with Ringling Bros.-Barnum and Bailey Circus, the best three-ring circus in the land. The great showman Cecil B. DeMille produced and directed this splashy, colorful look at life under the big top.... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Betty Hutton, Charlton Heston, Cornel Wilde, Dorothy Lamour, Gloria Grahame
Director: Cecil B. DeMille
Screenwriter: Fredric M. Frank, Barre Lyndon, Theodore St. John
Story: Fredric M. Frank, Theodore St. John, Frank Cavett
Producer: Cecil B. DeMille
Composer: Victor Young
Screenwriter: Fredric M. Frank, Barre Lyndon, Theodore St. John
Story: Fredric M. Frank, Theodore St. John, Frank Cavett
Producer: Cecil B. DeMille
Composer: Victor Young
Reviews
Top Critic
A great big lumpen mass of a movie that won a couple of Oscars (including one for Best Picture) and is studded with stars, but ultimately collapses under the weight of the clichés it carries round with it.
05/24/03
Top Critic
This is the circus with more entertainment, more thrills, more spangles and as much Big Top atmosphere as RB-B&B itself can offer. It's a smash certainty for high-wire grosses.
01/28/08
Top Critic
Top Critic
It won best-picture Oscar for 1952, but God (De Mille's favorite walk-on, strangely absent here) only knows why.
12/12/06
A Soap Opera under the big top, The Greatest Show on Earth features little in the way of a plot and more in the line of a hollow spectacle.
10/31/06
One of the worst films to ever win the Best Picture Oscar, Cecil B. DeMille's melodramatic circus adventure starring Jimmy Stewart and Charlton Heston inexplicably won the writing award (the called Motion Picture Story).
12/22/05
Clumsy, innocent, awkward, to be sure, but it’s never skimpy on the fun.
03/04/05
The Academy Award for Best Picture has been bestowed on any number of unworthy candidates over the years, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one less deserving than The Greatest Show on Earth.
11/19/04
It's an entertaining film, but it's certainly no masterpieceand doesn't really stand up to the year's other offerings.
05/08/04
Two American institutions have combined to put out a piece of entertainment that will delight movie audiences for years.
05/20/03
Top Critic
Heston is a bit huffy and bombastic, the train crash is amazing (for its time), but it's just like the circus -- too much to see and not enough of any one good thing.
10/25/02
Bloated, hopelessly creaky spectacle that's as boring now as it was irrelevant in 1952.
08/04/02
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