Movie Stats:
Released 1952 (USA)
American, in English
Director – Cecil B. DeMille
Stars – Betty Hutton, Cornel Wilde, Charlton Heston, and
James Stewart
Plot Summary:
It’s about the circus.
Bad Stuff:
Once more, let’s get this straight: forcibly grabbing a
woman (especially one who’s a stranger to you), telling her “when you say ‘no,’
you really mean ‘yes’” (yes, Sebastian [Wilde] really did say that to Holly
[Hutton]), and kissing her against her will is NOT romantic. This will not
induce a woman to fall in love with you, despite what the movies tell you.
The blue screening/special effects are terrible and thus distracting.
Most of all: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Good Stuff:
The costumes are fantastic.
I liked Stewart’s story line. It went in a direction I
wasn’t anticipating at the beginning of the film. And his acting was great, as always.
The Verdict:
Man, this movie was awful. The story is cliché. The acting
is almost universally terrible (Hutton is the worst of the worst). The
characters have no dimension. The dialogue – oh my GOD just shoot me. An actual
line for the movie: “Of course I feel sorry for you, you’re stuck with a blonde
for the rest of your life!” Ugh. Betty Hutton’s breathy little girl voice made
me want to stab myself in the ears. The endless circus crowd reaction shots – do I really
need to see multiple scenes of people with ice cream smeared all over their
faces? Really? And this movie is soooooo long and boring.
Seriously, it’s so bad that by the end I was rooting for one
of the lions to escape & maul somebody. I didn’t care who, just
somebody, anybody. Alas, it didn’t go
there. At least my friend P
should be happy. A movie has finally joined The Great Ziegfeld at the bottom of
the barrel.
I give this atrocious movie 1 star.
2 comments:
See! So bad! I really liked this movie when I was little, but I was eight and didn't know better. Plus I think I watched it on TV with commercials and other things to distract me. I will reward your watching with the Stenaros family lore that my grandfather took my mother and Aunts to see a re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the line stretched around the block (an actual blockbuster!) so they saw this instead. They liked it.
During my 2004 unemployment, I got a great book called Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week. The library had a bunch of the movies listed in the book and no one was requesting them so I happily requested and watched them. There was one movie where Jimmy Stewart played a lawyer defending a woman who had been raped and, boy howdy, did that entire movie not translate well to my modern ears. It was actually pretty entertaining the attitudes were so bad.
I can see why kids would like it. I can even kind of get why audiences of the time liked it. I see it the same way as I see "The Great Ziegfeld." Just as Ziegfeld brought the Follies to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to see it, this movie brought the circus to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to go to one.
That doesn't stop it from sucking though, haha.
Gosh, there are movies from the 80s that don't translate very well anymore, so I suppose it's stupid to expect even older stuff to. But it still bugs me.
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