A Film Canon

On the one hand, The Greatest Show On Earth conforms to the 1950s taste for regressive, nostalgic modes of entertainment, elaborating the logistical and romantic operations of a Barnum and Bailey circus. However, DeMille simultaneously reinvents the circus in much the same way as Busby Berkeley did the stage musical, condensing it to the ambit of a single eye - with the critical difference that its extravagances require the addition of Technicolour to be properly summarised. The result is a curious mixture of idealism and realism, as the circus oscillates between a mere extrapolation of the love triangle between its manager (Charlton Heston) and competing trapeze artists (Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde), and a mode of exploitation that finds its clearest analogy in the generalised subjugation of the modernist city, culminating with a catastrophic locomotive crash. This draws a common denominator between the silent era and the late 1940s' renewed interest in urban dynamics - "An army is at work, an army the audience never sees...strong, hardworking men, moving like a finely-geared machine." - while the concomitant preoccupation with shooting in real space and time is both invoked and sanitised in the film's documentary scope, which also enhances the breathtaking excitement of the stunts.