A perennial on lists of Oscar’s® ‘worst’ Best Picture; and why not with films like THE QUIET MAN, HIGH NOON, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL and MEMBER OF THE WEDDING out that year. Compared to those, this Big Top meller is pure hokum. But isn’t that the point? And it’s masterful hokum. Cecil B. DeMille had been putting on circus acts disguised as historical dramas for decades, and this one, taken on its own terms (loud, obvious, corny, vividly TechniColored), is more or less irresistible. (Plus, now doing double-duty as historical marker of a lost tradition, much of it frankly non-PC. All those elephants! At least they avoid lion-tamers.) Charlton Heston, improbably young and (perhaps, unknowingly) charming is the tough manager with sawdust in his veins; Betty Hutton a center-ring act pushed to the side when hard-to-handle trapeze artiste Cornel Wilde joins up. Add in loads of stars from Paramount and Ringling Bros., romance, jealousy, a model train disaster (they’re BIG model trains), competitor Lawrence Tierney in an alarming suit and James Stewart as a clown on the lam whose sole gag is always keeping his makeup on. Like circus shows of old, there are longueurs in musical spectacles & parades, but before long some reaction shot of various stunned, still little boys gazing in a mixture of terror, puzzlement or wonder show up to make you grin.
DOUBLE-BILL: Nothing tops Disney’s DUMBO/’41 at capturing the look of old-time circus.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Just before the hour & a half mark, during a montage of lesser acts, look quick for a young man working a ‘slack wire.’ This is nearly the same routine that was being done in Ring Three at the Detroit State Fair Coliseum just as The Flying Wallendas fell from their famous High Wire Pyramid Act, killing two, in 1962. (Picture of the new generation of Wallendas doing the stunt, but without a chair on top, and with a net.)
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