In one of the first films that Richard Leacock wrote, directed, photographed, and edited, the filmmaker achieves an absorbing level of intimacy and immediacy in his treatment of traveling tent performances known as “Toby Shows.” The central character in these folk theater melodramas was an earnest country bumpkin known as Toby, who outslicked the city slickers with home-grown honesty and rural wit. Toby in the Tall Corn takes us back to a time when the revival of this early American form was in full swing. It also takes us back to the origins of the Direct Cinema movement and speaks to the great changes that have occurred in the documentary form.