Nightmare Alley (1947)
Directed by Edmund Goulding

Film Review

One of the great classics of American film noir, Nightmare Alley is the most daring film to be made by the British writer-director Edmund Goulding, and features a gripping performance from the legendary actor Tyrone Power, here cast against type at his own personal insistence.  It has all the essential ingredients of a great film noir - flawed complex characters, atmospheric sets, beautiful expressionist black-and-white photography, and a viciously cruel plot that makes the film thoroughly compelling.

Nightmare Alley is based on a novel by the writer William Lindsay Gresham (his only success) and is essentially a Faustian tale which shows how a man's willingness to surrender his moral principles to an insatiable ambition leads him ineluctably to a horrific downfall.  The film conveys much of the bleakness and irony of Gresham's novel, and indeed has something of the character of a Greek tragedy fashioned as an expressionist nightmare, although the slightly upbeat ending (added at the insistence of the producer) does diminish its impact somewhat.   It's apparent where the film should have ended, with Stanton transformed into the Geek mentioned at the start of the film, a pathetic creature who has lost all trace of humanity, and it is disappointing that Hollywood self-censorship had to intervene and almost ruin what is otherwise a fine film.

What is perhaps most surprising about this film is Tyrone Power's determination to play against his own matinee idol image and carve out a completely different kind of persona for himself.  Power doesn't quite have the skill to pull off what he set out to achieve but he nonetheless manages to deliver a terrific performance that really does subvert his more familar nice guy image.  In his convincing portrayal of Stanton Carlisle he shows how low a man can sink in pursuit of what he considers success - a brutally cynical indictment of human nature that still has the power to shock.

Having directed a number of pretty ordinary but successful melodramas (most featuring some of the biggest names in Hollywood at the time), Edmund Goulding made a number of films that looked at the darker side of human experience, films with greater psychological depth and of a much grimmer tone than was expected of Hollywood at the time.  Nightmare Alley came after Goulding's thoughtful adaptations of two Somerset Maugham novels, The Razor's Edge and Of Human Bondage (both released in 1946) and is the most pessimistic of his films.  The film was not well-received, and its failure at the box office compelled Goulding to return to more conventional subjects with greater audience appeal.

Film Synopsis

Stanton Carlisle is a drifter who gets a job with a travelling carnival, the main attractions of which include “the Geek”, a rundown wreck of a man who bites the heads off live chickens, and Zeena, a mind-reader and fortune teller.  When Stanton accidentally poisons Zeena's husband Pete, he proposes that he and she form a new mind reading act.  Using the code which Zeena had developed with Pete, Stanton makes a great success as a mind-reader.  With Molly, the woman he is forced to marry, Stanton leaves the carnival and continues his act in exclusive night clubs.  His celebrity brings him to the attention of psychoanalyst Lilith Ritter, who has amassed a huge archive of personal information about her wealthy clients.  With Lilith's complicity, Stanton manages to pull off an even greater con, that he has the power to communicate with the dead.  He has no idea that his luck is about to change - for the worse…