The Big Show

It's night on a Paris bridge. A girl leans over Seine River with tears in her eyes and a violent yearning to drown her sorrows. Out of nowhere someone takes an interest in her. He is Gabor, a knife thrower who needs a human target for his show. The girl, Adele, has never been lucky and nowhere else to go. So she follows him. They travel along the northern bank of the Mediterranean to perform.

Throughout his life Edward Bloom has always been a man of big appetites, enormous passions and tall tales. In his later years, he remains a huge mystery to his son, William. Now, to get to know the real man, Will begins piecing together a true picture of his father from flashbacks of his amazing adventures.

In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.

Edith Lawson is engaged as the star dancer of a traveling tent show. Her circus name is Fatima. Billy Harvey, one of the performers, and a part owner of the show, is, or rather pretends to be, in love with Fatima, and she loves him in return. The arduous duties have made the poor girl ill but her managers cruelly insist that she must appear, as she is a feature. During her dance, however, she faints from weakness, and the audience is dismissed. Amos Holden, a young merchant in the village, who is in the audience, is deeply moved by the poor girl's predicament, and determines to help her.

Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. When Damiel falls in love with lonely trapeze artist Marion, the angel longs to experience life in the physical world, and finds — with some words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk — that it might be possible for him to take human form.

In one of the occupied European cities, the commandant of the garrison gathers a troupe of circus performers. Coming from different countries, they are in the humiliating position of people forced to serve their enslavers. Many of them, recruited from camps and workhouses, were quite content with their lot. Only after a chain of subsequent events, the artists raise an uprising. Unarmed people are not able to resist the arrived guards. They die, but at the cost of their lives they regain their lost human dignity.

When a woman dies in a car accident, her former husband (a traveling circus worker) learns that his wife was pregnant when she divorced him many years earlier. The now teen-aged daughter enters his life. Can they form a relationship?

"Don't pity me, just give me money." A smart little girl, Suzu, for the sake of her beloved sick mother, has no choice but to attempt all ways to fork up the money required for the operation. It includes stealing, cheating and almost anything that could yield cash. However, deep within her is a sadness unseen by many.

A child is born. We see underwater swimmers representing this. He is young, in a jungle setting, with two fanciful "instincts" guiding him as swooping bird-like acrobats initially menace, then delight. As an adolescent, he enters a desert, where a man spins a large cube of metal tubing. He leaves his instinct-guides behind, and enters a garden where two statues dance in a pond. As he watches their sensual acrobatics of love, he becomes a man. He is offered wealth (represented by a golden hat) by a devil figure. In a richly decorated room, a scruffy troupe of a dozen acrobats and a little girl reawaken the old man's youthful nature and love.

Mary Miles Minter is the title character. Pat (Minter) is a little orphan who has been raised around the circus. Her foster father is Toto the clown (Neely Edwards). Toto hopes to marry Pat until the day the circus comes to a Southern town and she meets handsome Dick Beverley (Jack Mulhall). Beverley falls in love with Pat and takes a job as trick rider just to be near her. Beverley's aristocratic parents (Winter Hall and Helen Dunbar) find out about his new job and insist that he come home. Two of the five reels survive.

Raju faces many hurdles and disappointments in matters of the heart throughout his life. But as a clown in a circus, he tries to make his audience laugh at the cost of his own sorrows. Along the way, Raju loves and loses, but must always keep a smile on his face because, in the words of his circus manager, "The show must go on."

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless, cult leader mother, and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.

Melrose's circus is being threatened by his competitor, who's angry that Melrose has outmanuevered him in bookings; what he doesn't know is that the competitor has also planted a saboteur who creates accidents in hopes of reducing the value of the circus. Meanwhile, he's also hired a beautiful young woman as the magician's assistant, with eyes toward more - but he realizes that, as a midget, she won't have him.

One out of three silent adaptations of the novella "Les quatre diables" written by Danish author Herman Bang. The most famous one, although unfortunately lost, is without any doubt F.W. Murnau's "4 Devils". This German version, by Danish director A.W. Sandberg, was done eight years prior to Murnau's American one, and was a big success at the time.

A circus performer falls in love with the son of a plantation owner in antebellum New Orleans. When the young man's stepmother objects to the wedding, the couple break apart and go their separate ways for a time. Also in the mix are two circus comics who feud over the heart of another Southern belle.

A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.

The arrival of a travelling circus sends ripples through the inhabitants of a remote Keralan village.

After Clown Teddy lost his son, he lost his gift for laughter. He opened a joke shop and lives above the shop. His landlady has had a foster son since birth, and Teddy decides to raise the child, who always believed that Teddy was his father. When the mother suddenly appears five years later and wants her son, Teddy decides to run away with the child and goes back onstage with his son. Will the family catch up with them, or will the mother never get her son back?

Post-war Germany 1945: Two rival gangs of uprooted boys fight each other in the ruins of Berlin, whose business is the black market out of necessity in order to survive. Their respective leaders are Gerhard and Dietrich. A pretty young circus artist named Corona comes to the destroyed city with a traveling circus. She immediately caught the boys' attention. When the latter notice that the circus director is abusing the girl, the two gangs join forces and plot an act of revenge against the tyrant. But with the hustle and bustle caused by this, Corona falls from the trapeze and is seriously injured. When the circus moves on, the boys organize a doctor for the sick artist who has been left behind. Their collectively concern for the blonde beauty makes them forget their enmity. This welds the troops closer together and sets the course for a common, meaningful future.

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