Summary
A traveling carnival’s brassy hurdy-gurdy spills onto the pock-marked streets of a nameless river town, where Zip Monberg’s swaggering barker—equal parts snake-oil evangelist and card-sharp Lothario—sparks a slow-burn obsession with Connie Henley’s tight-lipped snake charmer, a woman whose gaze could freeze moonshine. Their courtship plays out under canvas shadows, between knife-throwing acts and Fay Holderness’s bawdy fortune-teller routines, until Harry Sweet’s melancholic lion tamer arrives with a mangy pride and a past that smells of cheap whiskey and sawdust. What follows is a triangular duel of glances: a midnight tryst on the ferris wheel, a brawl inside the hall-of-mirrors that fractures more than glass, and a final high-wire walk above the river at dawn where love is wagered against gravity itself. Robbins’s script stitches slapstick pratfalls onto expressionist silhouettes, letting silence roar louder than the calliope, until the carnival pulls stakes and the town exhales, leaving only ticket stubs and heart-rot behind.
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