The Greatest Show on Earth

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day. What's different about this one is it ivolves Oscar's "Best Picture" category.

The Greatest Show On Earth (Cecil B. DeMille, 1952) 

 

Insufferable.

In every way, insufferable. 

Let's leave out winning the 1952 Best Picture Oscar (over High Noon and The Quiet Man*), as obvious Hollywood Industry pandering during the McCarthy Era anti-communist witch-hunt to the Grand Wizard of that cause, Cecil B. DeMille.

 
Let's just take that out of the equation and take the film for what it is.

 
The Greatest Show On Earth is an extended commercial/documentary/drama for The Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Filmed in eye-popping Technicolor (which is where the film, showing off the bright colors in many hues, truly is spectacular), that begins with the Director sepulchrally narrating a series of work-a-day location footage of the circus being prepped for its yearly run. The pompous tone that he sets is akin to a war film, the army metaphors stacked up thick and deep like a chain of marching elephants, with all the accompanying lack of grace and subtlety. Leave it to DeMille to take the fun out of a circus and turn it into something resembling boot-camp.

We transition (roughly, as DeMille's favorite transition is a quick right to left scene wipe, making it all seem like a moving slide-show) to the stars of the film acting roles that the folks who are told to stay out of their way actually do. Charlton Heston is the circus "boss"—the show-runner, if you will—who, in order to guarantee a "full season" (the complete city tour) has brought a marquee name, "The Great Sebastian" (Cornel Wilde, cheerily smarmy) to take the center ring, displacing his aerialist sweetie, the plucky but vain Holly, played by Betty Hutton.

This top-billed character is particularly annoying. Hutton could play dumb well (with a vocal range from A to A-), but here's she's a schizo in need of a pair of padded tongs and a generator, with a change of motivation and character for every change of scene. Buffed up to do her own trapeze stunts (smattering of applause for that), her character is so insecure that she's a harpie spinning like a Tasmanian Devil: "I HATE the Great Sebastian!" "I'm JEALOUS of the Great Sebastian!" "I LOVE the Great Sebastian," "No, now I HATE the Great Sebastian!" "I LOVE you, Sebastian!" "I feel GUILTY about Sebastian" "I'm going to forsake my Ca-REER for Sebastian!") 

I pity Sebastian, myself. As well as Heston, the guy you see rubbing his neck from whip-lash. See, she's in love with his character, although she's annoyed with the fact that he spends all his time trying to keep the Circus going, thus letting her keep the only job she's capable of, besides waving on floats. Hutton's Holly not only wears her heart on her sleeve, but also her ankle, around her pretty little neck as a broach, as a hat, anything but a symbol of commitment. She accuses Heston's Brad Braden** of having "sawdust in his veins"—at least he's got something in his. I wanted her capped in the head with her own trapeze twenty minutes in. Probably sawdust in that, too. 

No such luck. Before one can turn their attention to what Holly would look like in the tiger-cage and quicker than one can shout "Sebastian! No! Don't do it without the net!!," tragedy does befall the circus leading to broken bones and souls, angst and recrimination and another case of Holly-pong in desperate need of a net...held by men in white coats. 

The movie sets up a dull pattern: stentorian documentary section narrated by DeMille on "Circus as War Machine"/slide wipe to melodrama/slide-wipe to an extended sequence of abbreviated cir-cussedness that manages to make you feel slighted while still feeling interminable each time. Along the way, much of the subjects' opportunities are squandered, if not down-right sabotaged. For a scene of DeMille's heavies planning badness, DeMille stages the two Runyon-esque hoods*** (without the quaint patois) in front of a process shot simulating the outdoors. Halfway, DeMille cuts to a tighter shot of the two, but behind them the projection-screen image doesn't move, making it look like they've quantum-jumped closer to the camera. It's an amateurish give-away of a process shot.
And there's a cynical, rather crude attitude towards the circus audience—pandering to the audience while bashing them at the same time by endlessly showing giddy parents consuming ice-cream cones while their bored children look like they to want to erp up their cotton candy. But as the originator of this particular circus so famously said: "There's a sucker born every minute!" DeMille knew that lesson well.

Another lesson is the one of justice, where kindly Dr. Buttons (James Stewart in perpetual clown make-up...Richard Kimble never used that trick!), a surgeon on the lam for murder, unselfishly sacrifices himself by helping injured people on a train-wreck, exposing his true identity and is rewarded by getting cuffed and hauled off to the iron bar hotel. It was the '50's, after all—he could have been lynched. That would have to wait for prison, I guess. Thanks, doc! Take him away, boys. 

Another little game of the movie is a sporadic "Spot the Stars." There's Hopalong Cassidy! There's...somebody? Is that dewey debutante Jeanne Crain or a DeMille "ingenue?" And Bob Hope and Bing Crosby show up during Dorothy Lamour's number because its a Cyclical Universe on the Paramount Lot, with very tight gravitational rules; you could almost make a case for Creationism.

"Hey, is that Roddy McDowell?"

 

At some point during this megalith, you begin to realize with butt-numbing certainty, that if DeMille had cut out any of his "Circuses aren't some pink clown-show, they're American Hard Work" lectures, or maybe cut a "Tribute" sequence or parade or two, or one of the forgettable songs (or allowed Holly one less seizure) that the movie wouldn't have had to clock in at 2 1/2 hours in length.

2 1/2 hours is a longish book, with...ya know...subtleties, not a circus movie. But DeMille must have seemed unable to strip whole sequences, however redundant, away. Like Spielberg wanting to over-stuff 1941**** with beloved-by-none-but him-gut-and-budget-busting sequences, DeMille super-saturates the screen until the Technicolor fairly bleeds. And he couldn't bear, or didn't know enough, to cut any of it.

The only thing never mentioned in the many of DeMille's "Bozo Marches On!" narrations, is the requisite shoveling of the tons of manure. Why bother? The evidence is all there on the screen.

In a brilliant "meta" move, DeMille stages a train-wreck in a train-wreck.

 
* ...and the not-even-nominated Singin' in the Rain.

 

** ?...Brad Braden...of the "we-couldn't-come-up-with-a-better-last-name" Bradens? I think he became an "Ewok" trainer in later life.

*** One of them being Hollywood bad boy/guy Lawrence Tierney. He and Heston have a seething scene of clashing testosterone blasts.  

**** It was this very movie that inspired the Spiel-boy-g to pursue a career directing films. Spielberg learned his lessons concerning movie elephantiasis in his 20's. DeMille was in his 60's.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944) In the perpetual mating dance that writer-director Preston Sturges did around the blue-noses of the Breen Office, there was never a more sassy tango than The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, as sonorous a razz-berry, as flagrant a nose-thumbing as any director has done to his oppressive censors. 

Censors. It may seem odd in this "anything goes" era of film-making—where even dismemberment gets a pass for 13 year olds (but bare breasts get an "R"), where the foulest of epithets are uttered from the mouths of babes and fart jokes are de rigueur in kids' movies—that at the time this movie was made, you couldn't say the word "pregnant," or "virgin," men and women could not appear in the same bed, the subject of sex was merely metaphorical (as opposed to mythical in a teen movie) and represented by a camera pan to crashing ocean waves, burning fires, or shattered mirrors.

Yes, kids, we were Amish back then. At least, actresses weren't asked to wear veils...unless they were over 40 and the vaseline on the lens didn't hide the crow's feet.*

In this the script is an intricate little puzzle of studio "issues" that interlock to form a script that should have raised so many red-flags (and did), but take any of them out of the story and it would look like you were unpatriotic, immoral, or a perfect candidate for ex-communication. 

Of course, it's a comedy. Set and produced during war-time. And the sacred subjects of that war—God, Country, and The Troops—are all given a jaundiced eye that would come from living with a bellyful of bromides while just trying to eke out a living. Though clear-eyed and sentimental in the right places, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek can look at a manufactured convenience and still call it "bologna," and then acknowledge that, sometimes, bologna'll do the job. Even the movie poster has a conspiratorial wink in it. Like any good love story.  

Poor Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken). He's been in love with Gertrude Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) since they were kids, and he's got it bad. "I wish you were in a lot of trouble, Trudy, so I can help you."

Note to Norval: You, uh...you've REALLY got to be careful what you want. Especially when it comes to Trudy. She's only got eyes for the servicemen going overseas. She wants to do her part for our "fine and clean young men" and to give 'em a good time before they go off to war, over the objections of her constable father (Sturges pillar William Demarest). He forbids her to go to the USO dance on Tuesday, because as a veteran of The War to End All Wars, he knows servicemen have their minds on only one thing. "Oh no," says Trudy. "They're not like that any more! These are good boys, noble boys." But Pappy is unconvinced. So she conspires with Norval to take her to the movies, and once there, she dumps him, takes his car, and does a pub-crawl with the "nice boys," telling Norvel she'll meet him back at the flicks at 1:15. 

She doesn't make it back until 8:00 am, with the car in tatters, her memory a little shaky, and Norval in the Kockenlocker gun-sights to take the blame when they get her home. With legitimate reasons. 

Or even illegitimate ones.

Evidently, she did more than her part for the troops. Trudy doesn't remember a lot about what happened that night, it's kind of a blur. She thinks she might have gotten married, but she's not sure—she can't remember the guy's name. So, she keeps it to herself—the boys are shipping out, who'll know? Then, there's the little matter of her being pregnant. So, there's a double puzzle: she can't tell anybody she's married without a husband, but she's pregnant without ever having been married. Maybe. What to do, what to do? 

It's a scandal. The kind that small towns hush up and don't talk about; but what fun would that be? There's a way out of the problem—don't even go there—but it can't go smoothly, and before the solution can be found, it has to get more complicated—at the top of its lungs. It even turns political, with guest appearances by The Great McGinty (Brian Donlevy) and "The Boss" (Akim Tamiroff), from Sturges' directorial debut. 

 

I've never liked Betty Hutton. I've always found her loud and grating and usually playing scatter-brained simps. Well, her Trudy Kockenlocker is a scatter-brained simp, but Hutton makes her sympathetic and funny, with a perpetual look of comic confusion, exhausted with dis-belief. She's all too willing to do physical comedy in an extremely unladylike fashion (one of which involves her getting clocked by one of those mirror-globes at an out-of-control jitterbug dance). She's a complete joy in this movie, whether by herself, matching stammers with the brilliant Bracken (who moves so fast in this movie, I'm surprised he's not a perpetual blur), or sharing sisterly woes with her wise-acre sister (the nifty Diana Lynn), who is the Horatio to her densley populated Hamlet. Never has a movie had such fun in being irreverent about such American ideals as The War Effort, and even Motherhood. 

In 2001, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was selected for the National Film Registry. This American classic is also #54 on the AFI's "100 Years...100 Laughs" list of the funniest movies ever made. And it's somewhere near the top of the most boldly audacious movies ever created in a climate of repression. Add the caveat of taking such subversive gleefulness in its presentation, and it would be #1.

 

* It should be noted that once the Breen Office died the death of a thousand indignities in the late '50's and 60's, and subject matter was freed up for public consumption, There have been waves of motion picture permissiveness—we approach a line of the verboten and then back off, a few years later we creep up to the line and slink back in a cycle that seems more like evolution than revolution. There is still censorship, but the censor is the marketplace, and a film-maker must consider the box-office potential of his choices, as filtered by the specious and contrary dictates of the MPAA. Except for the screw-balls at the Ratings Board, it seems a more fair system: "Yeah, you can do that...but it's gonna cost ya."