Carnival Lady (1933) User Reviews

Tough Talking Boots!!

[kidboots · 7/10 · 5 June 2014]

Poor Boots - all set to go, then going nowhere! Named a 1932 Wampas Baby Star, 1933 proved her busiest year - then she was selected as star of Erich Von Stroheim's comeback picture "Walking Down Broadway", initially to be a hard hitting story of young love battling the depression and all that goes with it. Then, as usual on a Von Stroheim movie, the studio stepped in, assigned another director and what emerged was just another ordinary programmer. Looking at Boot's list of credits, her career didn't recover - I don't know why, she was lovely looking and wasn't any worse than a lot of other actresses who thrived.

Usually at home playing demure ingénues, this time Boots is a tough talking carnival dancer who has her hands full with "rough stuff" boyfriend Ryan (Jason Robards), a high diving specialist who is soon out of the picture via the hospital!! That gives Tom Warren (Allen Vincent) an opportunity to make good. He has turned up as a down and out at the carnival but he is, in reality, part of a young society group (you can tell they are upper crust because they sound so "tewwibly, tewwibly" British!!) who at the start are celebrating his coming marriage. The only person missing is the bride to be - she has heard that the bank in which he has been employed has gone bust due to embezzlement of it's funds - and has assumed (as a loyal, supportive fiancée) that he must be involved. Tom of course does the smart thing to clear his name - he runs away and even though he tells his new found friend Dick (Donald Kerr) that he has sworn off dames for life that doesn't stop him falling for carnival cutie Penny.

Once Penny turns off the tough talk she sounds as though she would be right at home in a New York penthouse, much more so than Tom. But when Tom's "tony" friends visit the carnival and laugh and titter at him hobnobbing with "those people", Penny puts on an act supposedly to send him back, chastened, to the right type of people. Of course you know how it ends - with Tom and Penny giving a cocktail party and Penny being talked about for all the right reasons!!

Allen Vincent's movie highpoint was as the lead no one remembers in "The Mystery of the Wax Museum"(1933) and while bubbly Anita Faye only had two films to her credit she comes across as a minor league Marjorie White.

This film is definitely not lost anymore, Alpha at Oldies.com has a reasonable print.

Join The Circus

[boblipton · 6/10 · 7 April 2020]

When Allen Vincent's bank collapses, he tries to get a job. All his rich friends, however, will have nothing do with him, so eventually he winds up working at a circus. There he meets Boots Malloy.

It's directed by Harold Higgins. He entered the movies in the late 1910s, working as production manager and 'technical advisor' for Cecil B. Demille. He began to direct in 1922, and distinguished himself as one of the muscular male directors. His career began decline in early 1930s, and he died in 1938, age 47.

There's a lot of shots of carnival acts in this movie, some of them, like the high dive, shot from interesting angles. It's full of good humor and, for a Poverty Row pre-code, fairly entertaining, despite the mediocre acting of its leads.

Hamburgers and Caviar.

[rmax304823 · 6/10 · 21 February 2015]

Not a badly done film for the period. Allen Vincent is a rich young man whose money suddenly disappears. (This is 1933.) A proud man, he lies to his effete, snobbish friends that he hasn't lost a cent but is merely going on a long trip. Only to his friend, Earl McDonald, does he spill the beans, the few that are left.

Vincent then uses his remaining sixty-seven dollars to vorkapich around the country, finally winding up broke at a carnival. He scrounges for a hamburger. He befriends two other men down on their luck and together they find jobs at the carnival. The cockiest of the three is Donald Kerr, who objects to being called a good "Samaritan" because he's Dublin Irish. It was a better gag when Woody Allen used it: "He said he was a gynecologist but he didn't speak no foreign languages." Vincent is the high diver, and a spooky high dive it is.

He also falls for Boots Mallory, the carnival singer. She's awfully appealing and a decent actress as well. She dances and sings a number, "Love in a Minor Key," in a pleasant voice that I presume belongs to someone else.

Little do Allen and Boots know that unpleasantness, if not tragedy, lay just around the corner. Allen's friends from the cocktail circuit visit the show to "see all the ridiculous people." Earlier, they had been briefly introduced to Mallory as Vincent's girl friend, but now they know about her milieu. Well, everyone believes you can't mix hamburgers and caviar, including Boots herself and Vincent's best friend, McDonald. You can take the girl out of the ferris wheel but you can't -- well.

Do all three of the original penniless beggars wind up joyous in marriage to suitable women? No! In a comic scene, the circus burns down and all are trampled by stampeding elephants!

A Charming Carnival Romance

[CatherineYronwode · 9/10 · 12 December 2022]

This underrated poverty row gem has so many winning features i scarcely know where to begin. The story is romantic and dramatic, and there are dozens of wonderful documentary scenes of including a carnival bally, a rigged carnival midway game, Kit Guard as a carnival boxer who will go two rounds with anyone, a delightfully acrobatic vaudeville specialty dance, and an actual death-defying high diver, filmed from several angles. Add to that some nice railroad train footage, a cameo appearance by Angelo Rossitto the burly dwarf, a couple of obese freak-show actors, and a strange mitt-reader named Zandra and you have a great production with Willis Kent touches galore.

Special shout-out to Donald Kerr as Dick, the acrobatic dancer and sure-shot boxer. He had a long career playing carnival barkers and pitchmen and appeared in more than 500 movies and television shows -- but as of this writing, in 2022, IMDb could not even be bothered to clip out a still of him to place on his bio.