I wrote a review (my latest pastime) at the Internet Archive on a 1950s newsreel film about Louella Gallagher, a circus performer mother in Texas who performed an act where she threw knives at her two little daughters, “missing them skillfully as the knives enter a board.” The little girls, aged 2 1/2 and 5, smile desperately as their grim-faced mother throws the knives. It’s a harrowing film to watch and it’s amazing that she wasn’t charged with child endangerment. Since there’s no father in sight, it could be that she was a single mother who had no choice but to travel throughout the southwest doing her knife-throwing act at county fairs and rodeos. It could be the theme of a novel or a film about some kind of intrinsic, American desolation. It also reminded me of another aspect of fifties life, the show on PBS about the history of Tupperware and how the women who sold it did so because there were no other career options open to them. Watching the knife-wielding Louella and her daughters Connie Ann and Colleena Sue, one sees the financial desperation of women embodied in its most heartbreaking way.
