Roach Circus

Road Show (1941) is not as weird as it seems - it's directed by Hal Roach, which probably explains a lot.

John Hubbard, a sort of handsome blank, plays Drogo Gaines, a rich man with an odd name. He is leaving his bride at the altar, pretending to have a mental breakdown. It seems that the bride is just a gold digger, so when she realizes he is faking, she pretends he has attacked her, and gets him committed to a "rest home."

Once there, he can't convince anyone he is sane, for the usual reasons. But he meets Adolphe Menjou, a rich eccentric who helps him escape. They meet a circus caravan, and the owner helps them hide. She is Carole Landis, playing Penguin Moore, another person with an odd name. Maybe they are meant for each other. 

Penguin's circus is low on money, and Drogo wants to help out, but 1) she doesn't know he's a millionaire, and he wants to keep it that way and 2) she's too proud to accept the money. So he gives her $100 to let Menjou have a photo concession - with his camera invention that automatically develops pictures that are usually blank.

So we have the usual fun of circus life. Patsy Kelly plays Jinx, who among other things plays an injun squaw in a medicine show act. She is amorously pursued by a small silent Indian played by George E. Stone. This would be a very racist depiction of a Native American, unless you think of him as an insane white man who just thinks he's an Indian. At least that's how I justified to myself.

I don't need to justify black comic character actor Willie Best - he plays the usual shuffling, cowardly black menial, but has a great scene where some lions escape. Penguin cluelessly tells him to round them up, and he timorously obeys, muttering, "I'm always hunting lions and such." When the lions corner him by the cage, he opens the door and firmly commands. "Get in there!" When they obey he says, "Was that me?" and struts out into a brawl - then quickly hides in a trunk.

Menjou has a rich nephew, Charles Butterworth, who likes to play with fire engines and other silly things. Menjou has the circus set up in his estate during a party and raises the prices about 1000%. So the money problems are over. But get this: the show gets busted up in the aforementioned brawl, so Menjou stores the wreckage in a barn that Butterworth is burning down for fun (to get to use his fire engine). Then Drogo shows Penguin that he has bought her a new circus - all shiny and birght, to be called "Gaines and Moore". And she is grateful - grateful that he has burned down her own circus, the circus that she loved and put her heart into, that she wouldn't take a penny for if she didn't earn it. 

Oh well, can't have everything.