The movie that inspired Steven Spielberg’s entire career
(Credit: Elena Ternovaja) Sun 10 December 2023 16:15, UK Sitting down to watch a Steven Spielberg[1] movie is a unique experience.
It's like settling into a cosy, well-made, and beautiful armchair. His movies are Hollywood cinema at its finest, with brilliant performances from stellar casts, stunning cinematography, and rousing scores. But Spielberg's own taste in movies ventures further askew than some might imagine, citing great American directors of the past and the masters from Europe and Japan.
But there was one film in particular Spielberg has said was a defining film on his entire career. Spielberg's earlier pictures from the 1970s quite literally invented the terminology "blockbuster" - the term referencing the cultural phenomenon of queues forming from the cinema and stretching around the entire block when a new film hit theatres, Spielberg's Jaws being a case in point. What followed was a series of groundbreaking films, Close Encounters of The Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, all becoming iconic film classics.
The trend followed suit with a tremendously successful film in the '90s with the release of Jurassic Park, Hook, and Schindler's List, firmly cementing the director as a box-office titan. Spielberg's latest offering was the autobiographical film The Fabelmans[2], an intimate and personal picture that captures the director's early childhood and his love for filmmaking. Over the years, Spielberg has gone on record talking about the filmmakers who influenced him.
He told NPR[3]. "My film school was really the cultural heritage of Hollywood and international filmmaking because there's no better teacher than Lubitsch or Hitchcock or Kurosawa or Kubrick or Ford or William Wyler or Billy Wilder or Clarence Brown. I mean, Val Lewton. I mean, those are my teachers".
There is one film, though, that Spielberg mentions as a defining moment in his life, the 1952 spectacle, The Greatest Show on Earth. When promoting the release of The Fabelmans on CBS[4], Spielberg discussed the impact the film had on him. "I didn't know what a movie was," Spielberg recalled. "My mom and dad took me to a movie in a theatre.
It was a movie about the circus. And after a while, I got very involved in the story. There's a train crash in the middle of the movie, and all I remember is it was the scariest thing I'd ever experienced in my entire life."
The Greatest Show On Earth, a thrilling technicolour extravaganza from Cecil B. DeMille, captures the pitfalls and struggles of a troupe of touring circus performers. Spielberg's first viewing of the film as a child is beautifully recaptured in The Fabelmans.
A magical scene follows in which Spielberg, as a child, recreates the famous train crash moment using a model train and shooting it on a Super 8 camera. DeMille once said, describing The Greatest Show on Earth, "Behind all this, the circus is a massive machine whose very life depends on discipline, motion, and speed--a mechanised army on wheels that rolls over any obstacle in its path--that meets calamity again and again, but always comes up smiling--a place where disaster and tragedy stalk the Big Top, haunt the backyard, and ride the circus train--where Death is constantly watching for one frayed rope, one weak link, or one trace of fear." Though DeMille is referring to his own picture, he could equally be referring to the mechanics of cinema itself.
It's no wonder Spielberg had such a profound reaction to seeing it for the first time and that it still holds a strong place in his heart.
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References
- ^ Steven Spielberg (faroutmagazine.co.uk)
- ^ The Fabelmans (faroutmagazine.co.uk)
- ^ NPR (www.npr.org)
- ^ CBS News (www.youtube.com)