The arrival of a travelling circus sends ripples through the inhabitants of a remote Keralan village.
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.
When Gelsomina, a naïve young woman, is purchased from her impoverished mother by brutish circus strongman Zampanò to be his wife and partner, she loyally endures her husband's coldness and abuse as they travel the Italian countryside performing together. Soon Zampanò must deal with his jealousy and conflicted feelings about Gelsomina when she finds a kindred spirit in Il Matto, the carefree circus fool, and contemplates leaving Zampanò.
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?
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.
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.
A spirited young woman finds herself destitute and on the streets before joining a traveling carnival, where she meets a vagabond painter.
Charlie, a wandering tramp, becomes a circus handyman - soon the star of the show - and falls in love with the circus owner's stepdaughter.
A magician in a carnival--who actually can read minds and levitate people and objects--works with a superintelligent chimp named Alex, who can also talk. The magician and the chimp soon become the stars of the carnival, drawing in big crowds. However, the wild-animal trainer, who has been displaced by the team as the carnival's top act, decides to kidnap Alex and sell him to a medical laboratory for experimentation, thereby getting rid of his competition.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
In 'The Circus Kid', Buddy, an orphan who runs away from a a harsh orphanage, joins Cadwallader's Circus.
"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.
Hope has an act in a traveling circus where she is "the rainbow princess" and performs a Hula dance. The owner of the circus pawns the girl off on Judge Daingerfield as his long-lost granddaughter. Hope goes to live with the judge, and to the horror of his upstanding family, insists on having the circus performers over as her guests. But the whole ruse, unbeknownst to her, is so that the circus owner's sons can rob the judge.
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.