Summary
A sulfurous ribbon of celluloid unspools across a nameless Midwestern nowhere, where the horizon itself seems bruised by a perpetual mustard haze. Into this ochre purgatory lurches a rattling flivver, its fenders coughing ochre dust, carrying Bob Kortman’s gaunt drifter—part carny huckster, part penitent scarecrow—whose pockets bulge with creased circus posters and a single, sun-faded photograph of a woman whose face has been scratched away. Marion Aye appears first as a mirage: a lanky, hawk-eyed tomboy in threadbare gingham, balanced on a split-rail fence, pitching stones at the sun as if she could fracture daylight itself. She’s chasing rumor of a traveling tent show that promises to turn “any dull daughter of the soil into a queen of the high wire.” Edward Burns, the troupe’s ringmaster, sports a waistcoat the color of dried blood and a grin like a split persimmon; he collects human oddities the way small boys trap lightning bugs, bottling them for applause. Kitty Bradbury drifts in as a faded soubrette who once headlined Kansas City opry houses; now she sells violet phosphorescence from a jar, swearing it will bleach freckles into constellations. Bob Reeves plays her loyal roustabout, a mute strongman whose biceps bear burn scars shaped like yellow stars—souvenirs from a night he refuses to discuss. The film’s spine is a single, relentless dusk: shadows lengthen, yellow turns to molten brass, then to iodine black. Contracts are signed in crayon on butcher paper; a horse dies of fright; a child vanishes inside a striped canvas wall; a love triangle combusts in a hayloft scented with kerosene and desire. When the circus decamps at dawn, only footprints and a solitary yellow feather remain, spinning in the dust like a question that knows better than to ask itself aloud.
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