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Though a hit with both the general public and Academy voters, the overblown circus soap opera The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) has in the more than half-century since its release not endured as a pillar of American cinema but a good example of the hammy, spectacle-driven excesses of its director, Cecil B. DeMille. 

But for Steven Spielberg, that movie didn’t just endure — it proved foundational. When his parents went to a showing in the early days of 1952, they figured it would be a good very first movie outing for their wide-eyed 5-year-old. The young Spielberg’s aghast speechlessness in the car ride home suggested otherwise. But soon afterward, when Spielberg was with intense focus recreating the train-crash centerpiece of the film with his own toy set, it became clear that that initially worrying loss for words was more a side effect of an artistic lightning strike — the beginning of a lifelong fixation on making images move and sing. It’s only sealed when his mother nudged him to capture his homemade train crash on the family’s home-video camera for posterity. This little kid didn’t just shoot the mini-collision in one boring take. He obsessively restaged it over and over so that the footage could echo DeMille’s own.

Read the rest of the review at South Sound.