Reception
The film earned an estimated $12 million at the North American box office in 1952 and was the most popular film in Britain that year.
In 1952, Bosley Crowther called The Greatest Show on Earth a "lusty triumph of circus showmanship and movie skill" and a "piece of entertainment that will delight movie audiences for years":
- Sprawling across a mammoth canvas, crammed with the real-life acts and thrills, as well as the vast backstage minutiae, that make the circus the glamorous thing it is and glittering in marvelous Technicolor—truly marvelous color, we repeat—this huge motion picture of the big-top is the dandiest ever put upon the screen.
In 1952, Time magazine called it a "mammoth merger of two masters of malarkey for the masses: P. T. Barnum and Cecil B. de Mille" as well as a film that "fills the screen with pageants and parades finds a spot for 60-odd circus acts" with a plot that "does not quite hold all this pageantry together."
In 1952, Variety wrote that the film "effectively serve the purpose of a framework for all the atmosphere and excitement of the circus on both sides of the big canvas."
In 1999, critic Leonard Maltin opined that "like most of DeMille's movies, this may not be art, but it's hugely enjoyable".
In 2005, "The Official Razzie Movie Guide: Enjoying The Best of Hollywood's Worst" includes The Greatest Show On Earth. The general sentiment about the film seems to be: it was a heinous mistake on the part of the Academy to give it the coveted Best Picture award. And in that same year the magazine Empire listed it as the third worst Best Picture winner of all time.
In 2006, in an article for MSNBC about the 78th Academy Awards selection of Crash as Best Picture, Erik Lundegaard called Crash the "worst Best Picture winner since the 'dull, bloated' film The Greatest Show on Earth"
Read more about this topic: The Greatest Show On Earth
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)