The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) on Netflix
NR19522h 32mDramaFamilyRomance
Brad Braden manages the world's largest railroad circus and needs a profitable season. He signs The Great Sebastian as its star, and Holly, his girlfriend, loses the center ring.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb6.5/1017,597 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes50%
Trailer
Plot summary
Brad Braden runs the largest railroad circus there is. Its board of directors prefers a short ten-week season to risking a loss in the postwar economy, and he bargains to keep the show on the road while it earns, so that his 1,400 performers and staff stay employed. Holly, his girlfriend and an aerialist, loses the top billing and the center spot to The Great Sebastian, a famous flyer signed as the new star. Sebastian arrives to a cold welcome from two old flames, Phyllis and Angel, who performs with elephants alongside the jealous Klaus.
Cast
- Cucciolaas Cucciola
- Antoinette Concelloas Antoinette Concello
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Art Concello, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey's general manager and the first flying trapeze artist ever to land a triple somersault in performance, personally designed and performed the stunt of the Great Sebastian's fall from the high rigging for director Cecil B. DeMille.
- The Greatest Show on Earth played for 11 weeks at Radio City Music Hall after its January 1952 premiere, a run length that tied a record set a decade earlier by Random Harvest (1942) and stood for many years.
- The Greatest Show on Earth's Best Picture win gave Cecil B. DeMille his first competitive Oscar nominations, for producing and directing the film, and it remained the only competitive Academy Award he ever won.
- Producer Stanley Kramer alleged that The Greatest Show on Earth's Best Picture win reflected 1952's political climate: DeMille was a conservative Republican tied to the National Committee for a Free Europe, while High Noon's producer Carl Foreman was soon blacklisted and one of Ivanhoe's writers, Marguerite Roberts, was allegedly blacklisted too.
- The Greatest Show on Earth was the first film Steven Spielberg ever saw, and he later cited its train crash scene as a major influence, echoing it in Super 8 (2011), showing a clip of it in his 2005 War of the Worlds remake, and dramatizing his childhood reaction to it in the opening of The Fabelmans (2022).
- The Greatest Show on Earth's title song went on to become the theme music for WGN-TV's long-running children's program The Bozo Show.
