Paula is a circus performer married to the alcoholic clown-acrobat Lorio. Lorio's heavy drinking leads to him being severely injured during a performance. This forces Paula and the now-crippled Lorio to become street musicians. This film formerly ran to 81 minutes – regrettably, the second half is considered lost.
The film is based on the words of a song performed by Iza Kremer in Odessa.
"The Living Corpse" - Fedor Protasov is tormented by the thought that his wife Liza never really made a clear choice between him and Victor Karenin, a more conventional rival for her hand. He wants to kill himself, but doesn't have the nerve. Running away from his life, he falls in with Gypsies, and into a sexual relationship with a Gypsy singer Mascha. Meanwhile, his wife Liza, presuming him dead, marries the other man, Victor.
The film discovered in 1916, is the second part of two circus-themed films released in the same year. Daniel Rok is pulp fiction, one of the many attempts to create an action film, following the footsteps of the Danish, the French, and the Americans. A good quarter of Russian pre-revolutionary film industry consisted of pictures like this. A circus drama was almost a sub-genre of its own. What distinguishes this film is the involvement of actual circus performers, some of the biggest names in the industry, many of them having never made another film. One could only wish that all of them would perform their signature acts, like Sergei Alperov and his son Dmitry Alperov, the legendary acrobats. Instead, Williams Truzzi, arguably the most famous Russian circus jockey of his time, plays the villain, Tamara Gamsakurdia, a horseback dancer, appears as his innocent victim, and Nikolai Nikitin, who would soon become the owner and director of the Moscow circus, becomes the noble hero.
