Film Preview – Bognor Regis Observer – Saturday, 30 August 1952

PAVILION, SELSEY. CECIL B. DeMILLE'S mighty Technicolor production, "THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH" a Paramount picture showing at the Pavilion, Selsey, all next week, is as tremendous in scope as its gigantic subject the lives and loves of the daring, iron-nerved and steel-muscled men and women of the great Circus. The cast of this great romantic spectacle, which was filmed on location with the famed Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, is headed by Betty Hutton as a lovely and fearless aerialist; Cornel Wilde as a dashing circus daredevil; Charlton Heston as a circus bowman, whose chief interest in life is keeping the show rolling; Dorothy Lamour as a hula girl; Gloria Grahame as a worldly-wise little elephant girl; and James Stewart as a clown who, for some mysterious reason of his own, never removes his make-up. In preparation for her role, in which she is seen performing every one of the dangerous stunts herself without a double Betty Hutton was coached for several months by Antoinette Concello, famed trapeze star of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. There were also no doubles used in the thrilling scene in which pert Gloria Grahame lies smiling on the ground while a 2-ton pachyderm slowly lowers his monstrous hoof until its touches her nose.