Hoopla

Lou is a dancer in a carnival sideshow. There is an old score to settle with the manager of the show. A friend the manager jilted comes to Lou for help. She is offered a hundred dollars in return. What is asked of her is to get close to the manager’s naive son. Lou takes the job and goes to work on the boy. At the start the plan runs along like a game. But she finds herself genuinely attached to him. She is caught between the deception and the wish to protect him. The backstage of the carnival, its bets and its small swindles sit behind all of this. The film shows that world without prettying it up. Everything comes to a head at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933. Lou goes out in front of the crowd one more time. The picture is a love story and a portrait of a carnival at once. Clara Bow left the screen after this film. Clara Bow and Preston Foster appear in the eighty five minute film, an American production Frank Lloyd finished in 1933.