Juggling in Movies

Goodbye Broadway (1938)

[Alice Brady, Charles Winninger, Tom Brown, Frank Jenks, Dorothea Kent]

Pat and Molly Malloy, once famed vaudeville and Broadway performers, arrive to play the small town of Hamilton, with a troupe of dancers, singers, a trained dog and an educated seal. Harry Clark, the clerk at the rundown Swanzey Hotel, insults Pat and the latter uses the $4000 that he and Molly have been saving for years to buy a retirement farm, so he can fire Harry. Local skinflint, J.A. Higgins wants the hotel as he knows the state has intentions to buy it for a museum, but Pat won't sell. Higgins puts an ad in "Variety" and a swarm of jobless vaudevillians, headed by Marvello descend to take advantage of the "free board" mentioned in the ad, and soon turn it into a three-ring circus. The only paying customer, Iradius P. Oglethorpe, informs Pat that the old chairs stored in the cellar are priceless antiques. Based on that, Pat refuses Higgins' second-and-higher offer, but soon learns that Oglethorpe is the village idiot and the chairs are worthless. Their last hope is a benefit show, staged by Higgins' nephew, Chuck Bradford, who loves Jeanne Carlyle of the Malloy troupe. But the free-loading vaudeville boarders skip town.

Credited as the Juggling Normans were Duke Johnson, Harry Johnson, and Roy Dove, and as a barrel juggler was Jerry Pina. Also listed as jugglers were the Four Clarkes, made up of Adeline Clarke, Althea Clarke, Catharine Clarke, and Charl Clarke.


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