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The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, "The Greatest Show on Earth," is starting a long tour. Brad, the manager, has engaged a famous French aerialist, Sebastian, as a star attraction; Holly, a trapeze artist with whom Brad is in love, has to be displaced from the centre ring. She is bitterly disappointed. On the tour, other characters are introduced: Buttons, the Clown, always wearing his make-up in case the F.B.I. should get him - a doctor years ago, he joined the circus to escape a murder charge; Angel, the elephant girl, and her jealous colleague, Klaus: Phyllis, the iron-jaw girl, an old flame of Sebastian; and Sebastian himself, a confident French charmer who flirts immediately with Holly. Rivalry on the trapezes develops between Holly and Sebastian and the latter, attempting a spectacular trick, falls and paralyses one arm. Holly, out of pity, decides she loves him. Angel then makes play for Brad, and the jealous Klaus, after trying to kill her by making an elephant stand on her face, is fired by Brad. The sullen Klaus falls in with crooks, who plan an attack on the circus train at night. The attack goes wrong, there is a train smash. Klaus is killed; Brad is pinned under the wreckage, Sebastian gives his blood for a transfusion, and Buttons operates, though knowing he will give himself away to the F.B.I. by doing so. The circus is badly damaged, and it is impossible to put up the big top in the next town. Holly, however, stages a mammoth parade and brings the townspeople to see the show in the open; she and Brad are reunited, and "The Greatest Show on Earth" goes hugely on.

De Mille and two big circuses; the collaboration, and the outcome, were perhaps inevitable. What surprises one about this long and extravagant film is not the boredom of the personal stories conceived in flat tabloid terms, with dialogue to match, the fantastic marrying-off at the end of Angel and Sebastian, who have hardly exchanged a word throughout the picture, the endless references to Brad - the dogged manager who puts the circus above his private life - as having "sawdust in his veins"; one expects the characterisation and dialogue to be childish in a de Mille film. Perhaps it wouldn't even have mattered if the other compensations had been there - a sign of real feeling for circus life, for instance, with its danger, its restlessness, its tawdriness. But no. Too many of the circus acts look faked, the backgrounds are one-dimensional, and de Mille himself intervenes from time to time with an almost insanely megalomaniac commentary stressing nothing but the size, the immense numbers and the immense expense of everything. Over a quite ordinary series of shots of the big top being dismantled after a show, and the business of packing up going quietly on: he describes the scene as "a mad chaos of man and beast". Apart from one impressive shot of the big top itself being erected, there is not a visually striking effect in the film. Dorothy Lamour, though billed as the iron-jaw girl, does nothing except croon numbers into a single microphone in the arena (she could never have been heard); Betty Hutton is energetic as Holly, James Stewart makes a lumbering and unengaging clown; Charlton Heston, obviously a gifted actor, has little to do as Brad.

Having paraded his circuses for two hours, de Mille then destroys them in the most catastrophic train crash imaginable. The damage done to so much solid machinery and apparatus would be surprising in any other picture. Of course, with so much apparatus to play with, de Mille and the film can hardly fail to give an impression of vastness, activity and a certain picturesque atmosphere; but this cannot conceal an almost heroic lack of imagination throughout.

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