From its opening shots of a circus clown and his dumpy wife, exposing herself while bathing to a regiment of soldiers, Sawdust and Tinsel is about the clownish humiliation of human beings. The camera moves about a tawdry, turn-of-the century circus setting to find Albert, the circus owner, and his mistress, the horseback rider Anne, who perform their own rites of betrayal and groveling humiliation before the film is over. In its bleak atmosphere and heavy eroticism, Sawdust and Tinsel is reminiscent of certain German models--in particular Dupont's Variety, with Emil Jannings. But in this early film Bergman already reveals, albeit in an almost Expressionistic way, what he would later hone into a more subtle form: “The camera...makes grotesques out of actors...transforms a dressing-room seduction into a secret, ornamental rite. It understands shadow and silence and the potency of over-decoration” (The Times, London).