Word: sideshow
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...cinema, once a suspect-competitor of the nickel sideshow, began its new phase in 1912 when Sarah Bernhardt, old and lame, said "Pictures are my one chance for immortality." At that time, Zukor, a 5 ft. 4 in. Jew from Ricse, Hungary, was running a movie theatre on Fourteenth Street, Manhattan. William A. Brady, his temporary partner, distrusted the new medium; so did most other producers and actors. Most of the theatrical people who, lacking other jobs, worked in pictures, tried out of shame to stay anonymous. Zukor told their names. On a scratch pad one night he wrote...
...husband has been killed in a sea tornado. With Brian, her son, she starts for the U. S., meeting on the way Bozo (Victor McLaglen), a lanky giant, and his harpist brother. The giant loves Ellen, follows her. He joins a circus, and persuades her to be a sideshow freak also. Ellen gives Brian to a school teacher for adoption, and there the lachrymation bursts forth. Years afterward the mother is a friendly charwoman, finally a nurse in a wealthy family. A youth comes courting, confiding to the old nurse his love for her charge. Thus mother and son meet...
...every school its "fat boy." To every club and circus its "biggest freak." The U. S. Senate, "greatest club in the world," school for Presidents, outstanding sideshow of the country, has Senator James Thomas ("Tom-Tom") Heflin...
...though Mr. Clive were offending his old patrons with his depressing antics, his spook dramas and extended productions of ham pieces. His old patrons have all quietly removed to the even hamier perlieus of the Henry Jewett sideshow on Huntington Avenue, but one feels that Mr. Clive, when peeping through a hole in the asbestos curtain, must miss the nice old ladies with ear trumpets, the nice old gentlemen with sidewhiskers, and the nice schoolkids who used to consider "Charley's Aunt" such a thriller. The Copley is now given over to strange and uncouth peasants from far places...
While Mr. Lowden has stood thus, he has been shouldered aside by a burly, blatant, sideshow barker from the city, whose ambition is not to sit in the chair himself but to call the crowd, direct the act and lead the ballyhoo. Mr. Lowden's enemy of old, Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson of Chicago, has spellbound the bystanders and gained mastery of Illinois, and perhaps a lot more Lowden territory, by an opportunism from which gentlemanliness is omitted with a frank grin. Nor is the Thompson grin as foolish as it looks...