Characteristically elephantine Big Top epic from DeMille, thumped across with a winning brashness and garnering the veteran showman his first Best Picture Oscar.
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06/24/06
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
41
%
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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
Genre: Dramas
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... [More]
Starring: Betty Hutton, Charlton Heston, Cornel Wilde, Dorothy Lamour
Director: Cecil B. DeMille
Reviews for The Greatest Show on Earth
Top CriticA 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 CriticThe movie's plot does not quite hold all this pageantry together, but De Mille's scripters and actors enter into the thing in the proper flamboyant spirit.
02/18/09
Top CriticThis 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 CriticMiddling circus backstage drama.
01/24/07
It's big, it's garish, it's loud, and most of all, it's wonderful.
12/12/06
Top CriticIt 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
Fun DeMille full of spectacle and flashy stars...and a great train wreck.
07/21/06
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
No review available.
03/17/04
A shoddy Best Picture.
11/05/03
Two American institutions have combined to put out a piece of entertainment that will delight movie audiences for years.
05/20/03
Top CriticHeston 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
It's so deliciously retro.
10/23/02
Big, long, ultimately tedious
08/21/02
Bloated, hopelessly creaky spectacle that's as boring now as it was irrelevant in 1952.
08/04/02
Latest News for The Greatest Show on Earth
April 07, 2008:
Charlton Heston: 1924-2008
Charlton Heston has passed away at the age of 84. More...
February 16, 2007:
Count Down Oscar History with RT's Best of the Best Pictures
We're kicking off a clear and sunny California Friday with a new feature: The Best of the Best Pictures, a convenient Tomatometer-sorted list of all 79 Best Picture Oscar... More...
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