Cinema: The Great Train Wreck

The Great Tram Wreck

In a day of skintight budgets and rigid shooting schedules, Cecil B. DeMille is one of the few producers who can still pursue Hollywood’s ancient slogan: “The more you spend, the more you make.” For the climax of Samson and Delilah (TIME, Dec. 26, 1949), he smashed his enormous temple three times before he was satisfied that he had achieved just the right touch—and the box-office returns justified his little extravagance. For the big scene of The Greatest Show on Earth, now shooting, Producer DeMille’s script ordered a train wreck with “a shattering impact of shattering steel and wood amid the crescendo of injured humans and screams of caged animals.”

The result was a spectacle in the best DeMille tradition. For six weeks, Paramount hirelings bought and built a circus train with two animal cars, two circus flat cars, two Pullmans, a job lot of animal cages, and hundreds of feet of tracks. Then a monster crane wheeled on to the set, dangling a huge house-wrecking ball, and reduced the $200,000 investment to a shambles. When Perfectionist DeMille was finally satisfied with the destruction, two cheetahs, three lions, a black panther, a puma, an elephant and a band of monkeys were sent swarming through the block-long wreckage (along with such human specimens as Betty Hutton, Dorothy Lamour and Jimmy Stewart), and the cameras began to grind.