Where else can you find the one truly awful Charlton Heston performance (his interpretation of machismo is to wear a tough hat and pout like a 12-year-old)? Where else can you find dialogue that would make soap stars demand a rewrite? Where else can you find a train wreck that looked impressive in the 1950s but today appears to be someone slamming a bunch of cereal boxes against each other end to end? Where else can one of the five or six greatest film actors waste his efforts behind clown makeup and with a backstory straight out of -- well, those soaps that need rewriting? And where else can minutes upon minutes of screen time be taken up with circus footage that has nothing whatever to do with the plot (which probably makes these scenes the best in the movie)? I mean, Berserk (1968) was a better circus movie! Oh, and let's not forget DeMille's own narration, in which circus folks attain a kind of nobility not seen since the noble folks in -- well, any other DeMille movie!
By all means, see this movie at least once. But I warn you, if you rent it somewhere, you'll end up buying -- it's the best bad movie of them all!
