The Star of the Side Show

The Star of the Side Show is the "Thanhouser Kid" (little Marie Eline), who takes the role of a midget. In the early scenes she is a little Dutch woman in sabots, who refuses a proposal of marriage from a neighbor, also a midget. She joins a show and has a very amusing flirtation with the show's giant. He is sick with love for the serpent charmer and she feels the pangs of jealousy; but the other midget also comes to the show and we have a pretty wedding ceremony. It is something fresh, new and delightfully amusing. It makes a very good feature. The photographs are fine. - The Moving Picture World, April 13, 1912

Actually, it's all camera faking and props, Ten-year-old Marie Eline plays a midget. One day showman 'P.T.Barum' shows up in the village looking for freaks, and the next thing you know, she's in a tent meeting the other exhibits in the side show. Of course she falls in love with the giant, 6'6" Robert Milasch.

It's a simply told tale from the Thanhouser Studio, with their usual care given to all the technicalities of movie-making in the period. Thanhouser was situated in New Rochelle, and with the founder's connections into the theater, he had access to the resources of the New York stage, and the ambition to make respectable and respectful movies. Like many of the early movie companies, its films fell into obscurity, and were considered lost. However, Ned Thanhouser, the grandson and namesake of the founder has spent the last thirty years or so tracking down and making available as many of the company's films as possible.