In a typical traveling circus, all the workers have problems over their heads; A puppeteer named Magnus controls his troupe like marionettes until a good clown arrives on the scene to help relieve them of their burdens.
In the silent film era, attorney Leo Harrigan and gunslinger Buck Greenway are hired to stop an illegal film production. However, they soon team up with the filmmakers and become important players in the show business industry. Leo learns he has a talent for directing, and Buck's cowboy persona quickly earns him leading-man status — but both men fall for beautiful starlet Kathleen Cooke, leading to a heated personal rivalry.
Enthusiastic young woman runs away to Chicago to start a new life. She is soon confronted with the emotional coldness of the big city and has to search for her place in the scheme of things.
A somewhat daffy book editor on a rail trip from Los Angeles to Chicago thinks that he sees a murdered man thrown from the train. When he can find no one who will believe him, he starts doing some investigating of his own. But all that accomplishes is to get the killer after him.
GOLDSTEIN, the feature film debut of talented director Philip Kaufman, is an early example of American independent filmmaking from the early 1960s. A fable about an old man with an odd effect on those he encounters, the film is a funny, warm-hearted postcard from an important moment in American cinema. GOLDSTEIN, starring veteran character actor Lou Gilbert, shared the Prix de la Nouvelle Critique at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival with Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution. Cinema deity Jean Renoir called the film "the best American film I have seen in 20 years."
