People are voting emotionally.

Excellent, smart action film.

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Robbie Robertson a member of the famous roots rock group, The Band sang rural, pastoral country folk/rock with a touch of pessimism.Carny co-written and starring Roberson is a rather plot less and meandering film that needed a better and sharper director. However it carries on the themes of The Band as you enter the world of a travelling carnival in the south filled with strange people, the tallest, shortest, the bearded and the contortionist.Frankie (Gary Busey) is a twisted clown in the carnival, always winding up the punters as he sits on a dunk tank taunting them.Patch (Robbie Robertson) is a fixer at the carnival, he works the dunk tank with Frankie and smooths things over with locals and the carnival operators.Frankie hooks up with Donna (Jodie Foster) a rather bored young woman whose boyfriend Frankie humiliates. She joins Frankie at the circus although Patch is not too pleased about it and she initially works on the strip show before finding out that she is a natural conning the punters on the rigged games of skill.Patch and Frankie have to deal with one of the gangsters who is extorting money from the circus boss and whose henchman takes a shine to Donna.Foster is very sexy, she gives another mature performance and to think she was only 18 years old at the time. Just watch the scene when she hustles two lesbians, very sensual and natural!

An unusual low-budget film about the carnival circuit and the people who run them.Knowing nothing about Carnies beyond them tending to be associated with hard work, light crookedness and putting local girls up the duff and then leaving town, I can't say the film really gripped me or helped me understand them better. More story and character development would have been a big help. I wanted particularly to know more about the backgrounds of the principle trio to understand what drove them and where they thought they were going, if anywhere.That said it's an entertaining film with a solid cast. If you like 70's era films this won't disappoint. I was unsure what to make of Donna (Jodie Foster). Her character seemed to be an odd mixture of conflicts and innocence (soon lost) wrapped around an ambition that would hurt those around her if allowed to go on. Fortunately her two mainstays Patch (Robbie Robertson) and Frankie (Gary Busey) are fairly worldly wise, particularly Patch who oversees the midway and pays off local officials to keep things uncomplicated.Donna tries her (very green) hand in the burlesque tent with predictably bad results, no thanks to Patch. She finally teams up with Gerta (Meg Foster), she of the startlingly pale irises, in the string-pull booth. It could have gone interesting places from there but it ended unsatisfactorily to me and the carnies were portrayed as rogues who were a little too likable. Frankie had his demons but he seemed, at core, a decent guy and his relationship with Donna had real promise that was overlooked.If you're a fan of the principle players or just think that an 18-year old Jodie would be very easy on the eye (as indeed she has always been) then it is worth a look.

A real unsung movie from the early 80s. Jodie Foster literally runs away and joins the carnival where she hooks up with smooth Robbie Robertson and his crony...carny clown Gary Busey. They're both womanizing cads who nonetheless give Foster an education she may very well not want. CARNY is a depressing, enthralling, and extremely well-made film. Director Robert Kaylor infuses the film with a lot of melancholy touches...from the desperate fights with local politicos to the desperate lives the carnies lead. The story is perhaps a bit too depressing, but it is still great movie making. Meg Foster (creepy eyes and all) appears as one of the carnival barkers. The great Bert Remsen and Elisha Cook are in it too as is Craig Wasson in an early role as a jock who gets his comeuppance. Whatever happened to Robert Kaylor?

This is one of the only films in existence that truly depicts the Carny as he/she was during the 50's and 60's. Why it has not made it to DVD is a real mystery.Gary Busey and a young Jodie Foster are the mainstays of this film. Foster is beginning to show the talent that will shine in later films.Part coming-of-age chronicle, part road movie, Carny is memorable for Jodie Foster's sexy, intelligent heroine and the pivotal influence of costar, co writer, and producer Robbie Robertson. Robertson is Patch, a carny veteran whose de facto partner is the leering, cruel Frankie (Gary Busey), an abusive clown, and the film lingers on the tawdry and menacing world behind the carny's garish public spaces. When the young, self-confident Donna (Foster) shows up and joins the troupe, the bonds between Patch and Frankie are strained. Donna's walk on the wild side brings her in intimate, sometimes dangerous proximity to the freaks and lowlifes that populate this world, which the writers and director Robert Kaylor savor for its atmosphere of outsider surrealism.Foster acquits herself wonderfully, making this a revealing step between the prematurely hardened nymphet of Taxi Driver and the actress's first truly adult roles, soon to follow. Busey and Robertson fare less well, their work long on mannerism but ultimately cryptic to a fault. Like the movie itself, they transmit a cynicism that seems hollow without more real insight into how they came to inhabit this netherworld, and why they can't escape it. B-Sutton