Jul. 16, 2002 - 2:08 am
one more Best Picture down. and one more to go. i had of course been putting this one off. as i've said before, i'm just not a huge Cecil B. DeMille fan. and i can't believe that this film beat out High Noon (1952) for the Oscar. amazing. i guess everyone thought DeMille was a god back then. and how wrong they were.
this film has almost a 50s documentary style to it in a way. like if you've ever watched the Disney Channel and seen some of the cartoons with documentary stuff in them where the guy reads a "poetically-descriptive" monologue over footage of real life events, it's like that. but there are also parts where we just sit for 10 minutes and watch circus performer montages that aren't shot in very interesting ways. mostly extreme long shots as if we were sitting in the stands watching. there is never any remotely interesting cinematography in his films. at least there was a little more complexity than in The Ten Commandments (1956) though.
along with these two aspects of the film, we also have short stints where we focus on watching how a few of the circus performers relate to each other. this is where the narrative element of the story is. you have Charlton Heston (booo) as the boss of the circus, Jimmy Stewart as Buttons the clown who is actually a doctor on the run from the law (strange i know), Betty Hutton as the lady who is in love with two men back and forth for the entire film and doubles as an acrobat, and Cornel Wilde as The Great Sebastien - a french acrobat who everyone falls in love with even though he's an ass.
this film mostly bored me for the first 2 hours. then there were some interesting plot elements at the very end like the huge train wreck where one collides with another, and the man who nearly dies on the trapeze. it wasn't a great spectacle and i didn't expect it to be. but i must push on through to finish up the list. only one more...