GROSS/43 1952 - what a bloody circus
Please make this the last Cecil B. DeMille film I have to watch.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, director CECIL B. DEMILLE, cast BETTY HUTTON, CORNEL WILDE, CHARLTON HESTON, DOROTHY LAMOUR, GLORIA GRAHAME, production company PARAMOUNT PICTURES, released 1952, 152 MINUTES.
Most people don’t even know it happened now, 75 years on, but right after the war - in the USA and Europe mainly - there was a big revival of interest in Christianity, especially in the more basic varieties. It was boom time for the whole spectrum, though - the protestants, the atholics. All of them.
In America, evangelists and Pentacostalists and a dozen other denominations filled huge, new suburban churches - almost 50% of Americans were going to church weekly by 1958 - the highest proportion ever. The televangelists built a new industry picking up where the radio preachers and the camp meetings of the past had left off (and boy did they make some money). And this was the beginning of the boom in fundamentalist Christianity that shapes American public life to this day. It would be impossible to explain contemporary US politics and the rise of Trump without an understanding of the Christian revival.
Christianity had never gone away, of course, but in previous decades the habit of piety and the church-going routine had been pushed aside - by industrialisation, by the explosion of consumer capitalism and the rise of the suburban bourgeoisie - everybody was much too busy with acquisition to get down to the church every Sunday.
The bishops and ministers and the whole establishment gang - dog collars, flannel suits, golf club blazers - couldn’t believe their luck. Christianity was back, and with it - they hoped - the whole conservative apparatus - family, self-reliance, money, power, respect for authority and so on. And they were, let’s face it, right.
Anti-communism as faith
In Europe the various Christian Democrat parties became the focus for a similar conservative renewal and for an organised push back against the communists and socialists (more about Italy’s Christian Democratic machine in the Quo Vadis episode - a lesson in pragmatism and old-fashioned political brutality if you ever needed one).
And there was that other American religion, the political one of anti-communism, in which opportunist Cardinal Joe McCarthy (a devout Roman Catholic) put the entire culture on a warning. The entire culture was, of course (with the tiny number of exceptions of which we are all aware), happy to comply, closing off whole areas of enquiry, whole departments of the human experience at the insistence of the religious arbiters.
All of this explains why, in Hollywood, looking back on it, the 1950s seems to unfold as a sequence of grim, ideological blockbusters (plus Disney, of course) - and why we wound up with a long decade (starting really with the various weird, neutered wartime nothings) of dull lessons in propriety, morality, hard work and respect for your betters. Women were summarily put back in their box, workers were seen but only wearing togas and dragging a huge stone head up a slope or something. Supine studios cancelled everything even slightly dreamy or edgy. It would be decades before another verified film noir was made. In 1949, King Vidor - a kind of intellectual DeMille - even made a movie from one of the more absurd foundation texts of the anti-communists: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (being an atheist and a kind of dime-store Nietzschean must have limited her influence in this period, though, to be sure).
Tarrantino has called the 1950s a “horrible decade for the movies,” a ‘play-it-safe’ decade of ‘fun for all the family’. He contrasts it unfavourably with the more mature stuff coming from the European cinema - all those, sexy, moral fairytales that were inspiring the young artists who would later impatiently re-invent Hollywood.
King of Hollywood
Cecil B. DeMille made films in half a dozen genres, across many decades (at this point he’s forty years into his career and he has one more epic to make). We know him to be one of the innovators, one of the brilliant entrepreneur-creators who essentially invented contemporary Hollywood. There’s no arguing with that. There’s something in his boldness and in the way he trusts in reality and in monumental scale that’s admirable. In fact, in his readiness to build and populate a whole world from scratch in every new project he’s like Rand’s Howard Roark or John Galt - insatiable and promethean. But he was always prurient and mean-spirited and judgemental - and by his later years he was really an insufferable old git, a charmless bore.
I haven’t read any of the several biographies that exist but if I’m allowed to consider his movies a biography then I know enough. He’s more than a bore. He’s the archetype. The top bore. And in this he stands for a whole generation of miserable, sanctimonious, moralising American bores. I can barely bring myself to write about this big, boring bore and his big, boring movie.
In the centre ring
Watching DeMille’s output from across the decades you’ll often be brought up short by the sheer number of actual human beings in his movies - not just the famous armies of extras but real people going about their actual jobs. The Greatest Show on Earth is embedded in a real, appropriately huge, human enterprise - a circus, the biggest railroad circus in the world, in fact. Employing 1,400 men and women and hundreds of animals, the movie features 85 real acts from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The movie’s a kaleidoscope, a blur of tumblers and clowns; lions and chimps and horses; trapeze artists and dog acts. We’re asked to appreciate the scale and the ambition of the circus. We are genuinely in awe.
And, critically, DeMille’s circus models the conservative patriarch’s ideal organisation, his ideal mode of being, in fact. The circus is definitely not anything namby-pamby like a ‘community’. It’s not a collective entrerprise, not a ‘great big happy family’ or anything like that, not a joyful thing at all. The narrator tells us, in the establishing scenes:
“…the circus is a massive machine whose very life depends on discipline, motion and speed. A mechanised army on wheels that rolls over any obstacle in its path…”
It’s really all here, in this grim summary. For DeMille a circus - like a movie production or a corporation (or a state, we suspect) - is:
“…a fierce, primitive, fighting force that smashes relentlessly forward, against impossible odds…”
Admittedly, it’s also:
“…a tinsel and spun-candy world of reckless beauty and mounting laughter and whirling thrills, of rhythm, excitement and grace, of daring and blaring and dance, of high-stepping horses and high-flying stars…”
But under the greasepaint, The Greatest Show on Earth is an orthodox melodrama. Two interlocking storylines lead to sacrifice, retribution, redemption on the scale of an ordinary Hollywood weepie. I won’t trouble you with the detail. It’s charmless. James Stewart, gamely lolloping around the set in the big shoes as Buttons the clown, the man who does all the sacrificing and is ultimately redeemed, wears a disguise throughout this movie. I’m left wondering if the rest of the cast wouldn’t have appreciated doing the whole thing incognito too. In this promotional clip, made during the production, DeMille’s female star Betty Hutton calls him ‘sir’, although the fact that she’s balancing on a trapeze forty feet up may be contributing to her nerves:
By this point DeMille’s conservatism is fully entrenched - FBI- and State Department-compliant. He’s providing regular lists of film industry ‘subversives’ directly to J. Edgar Hoover (this may explain how he was able to avoid testifying to the HUAC, despite being invited twice) and supporting various anti-communist projects, including Radio Free Europe. He was a happy recruit to the global CIA-funded propaganda effort, a programme that took in the abstract expressionist painters, Louis Armstrong and W.H. Auden and led some to the unsettling conclusion that all of post-war modernism was a US government psy-op. But that is definitely another story.
The Greatest Show on Earth lumbers along, moralising dryly - Pauline Kael called it a 'cornball enterprise' - but at least there are dancing elephants. DeMille’s final epic, The Ten Commandments, is waiting for us. No elephants. I’m afraid I must review it because it was the biggest film of 1956. Sorry.
In pre-industrial terms, the movies are our Renaissance cathedrals. When the histories of art are updated, the Camerons and DeMilles will be our Christopher Wrens and Brunelleschis. Their producers and backers our Medicis and corrupt Popes.
There are complicated connections that I think it would take a PhD to trace, between the American government’s large-scale interventions in culture, the religious revival, the reconstruction of Marshall Plan Europe, NATO’s hegemony and the almost total colonisation of the world movie imaginary by Hollywood. I’ll get back to you when I’ve written it.
In 1950 DeMille tried to gain control of the Screen Directors Guild and to force through a compulsory ‘loyalty oath’ - in compliance with 1947 anti-union legislation. He ultimately failed but the Guild did introduce a voluntary oath. Members were required to swear: “I am not a member of the Communist Party or affiliated with such party, and I do not believe in, and I am not a member [sic] nor do I support any organization that believes in or teaches the overthrow of the United States government by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.”
Tarrantino’s Cinema Speculation is as smart as you’d expect it to be and he writes about the dreadful 1950s (and the even more dreadful 1980s).
France Stonor Saunders’ book is the standard reference on ‘the cultural cold war’. Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War is also thoroughly mind-bending but out of print.
Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell’s Know Your Enemy podcast is a pretty gripping journey through American conservatism.
Useful 1997 piece about ‘the varied spiritual marketplace’ of 1950s America from pastor and academic Robert Ellwood.
Here’s a new idea - a t-shirt based on the movie reviewed (also, I’ve registered the domain name gross.ly - although it’s not in use yet. Neat, huh?).
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