The Greatest Show on Earth (Paramount) is a mammoth merger of two masters of malarkey for the masses: P. T. Barnum and Cecil B. de Mille. It is not just a movie about the circus; it is a fat Technicolored reproduction of the 1951 Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus itself, fondly filmed from all angles by Producer-Director de Mille, and generously overlaid with a three-ringed melodrama enacted by movie stars in the roles of sawdust demigods.
Showman de Mille, serving as his own narrator-pitchman, fills the screen with pageants and parades, finds a spot for 60-odd circus acts: aerialists, sword swallowers, clowns, acrobats, showgirls, lions and tigers, performing dogs, horses, seals, bears and elephants. He is also fascinated by circus logistics: the huge, complex task of getting the show on the road and off, of grappling with such photogenic jobs as unfurling acres of canvas and raising them into the big top.
The 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. Determined to extend a ten-week itinerary into a full season, Charlton Heston, the circus' gruff but devoted manager, promises his reluctant bosses (including John Ringling North himself) to show a profit. He imports Sebastian the Great (Cornel Wilde), a daring high-trapeze artist, thereby queering himself with Aerialist Betty Hutton, who must move out of the center ring. Betty starts a performing feud with Wilde, goads him into a fall that cripples his arm.
While Betty warms up to the injured Wilde, a sexy elephant stunt-girl (Gloria Grahame) moves in on the eligible Heston. A jealous Prussian elephant trainer (Lyle Bettger), foiled by Heston when trying to plant an elephant's foot on Gloria's pretty face, joins a plot to halt the circus train and rob the cashier's car. He causes a gargantuan train wreck—for which De Mille demolished full-sized trains (TIME, May 7). The wreck not only awakens Betty's love for Heston and her organizing genius in effecting the circus's comeback, but unmasks a clown (James Stewart) as a great surgeon who has been hiding behind his make-up for years (and throughout the film) to beat a euthanasia rap.
As big, broad and heavy as the elephants that lumber through it, The Greatest Show on Earth will find a surefire audience among circus fans. Other moviegoers who endure its two hours and 33 minutes will have to console themselves mostly by laughing at a story that often makes a travesty of itself.
If art were merely a matter of fitting form to content, the movie would be a masterpiece, for De Mille and the circus are fated for each other. By sprinkling his footage with shots of circus audiences munching all the tidbits of the refreshment stand, De Mille tightens his claim to another distinction: Greatest Show is likely to sell more popcorn than any movie ever made.
The Model and the Marriage Broker (20th Century-Fox) defaults on a promising idea: a down-to-earth professional matchmaker, played by tart Thelma Ritter, at large among the lonelyhearts. Random glimmers of a good spoof on courtship and marriage mores get lost in an overplotted movie that strains for pathos when it is not straining for laughs.