Written by Jules Furthman
Directed by Edmund Goulding
U.S.A., 1947
A carny cons his way up to high society through cold-reading and (un)timely circumstance. Based on that one-liner, who would you cast? If you say Tyrone Power, I’d say that my friend Stan Carlisle is on his way (The name Stan Carlisle being a con-industry handshake of sorts, informing one con-artist that he’s stepping in on another man’s con, or at least according to Eddie “The Czar of Noir” Muller’s introduction of this film at TCMFF). In Nightmare Alley, Tyrone Power, the 20th Century Fox matinee idol, plays a lowlife con man, who lies and cheats his way from a podunk carnival to becoming a spiritualist amongst the more gullible of Chicago’s upper crust. His character is also the namesake of the above con slang.
And any which way, yes, Tyrone Power stars as that scheming carny. Coming back from WWII and tired of his swashbuckling image (See: The Mark of Zorro, Blood and Sand, The Black Swan), Power read the William Lindsay Gresham novel and bought the rights for film adaptation immediately. To get Nightmare Alley made, Power agreed to star in Darryl F. Zanuck’s own pet project The Razor’s Edge (1946), the highly regarded adaptation of the William Somerset Maugham novel. Once the deal was struck, Zanuck sent his best to work on Nightmare Alley with Jules Furthman (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep) adapting the script and Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel, Dark Victory) helming both this and The Razor’s Edge. (Coincidentally enough decades later, Bill Murray would agree to star in Ghostbusters in order for Columbia Pictures to produce a remake of The Razor’s Edge. Time is a flat circle, eh?)
Nightmare Alley opens on a shabby-looking travelling carnival (more Freaks than American Horror Story: Freak Show). As a balloon-wielding crowd bustles through tents and peddlers, the camera turns to a wind-worn banner advertising “The Miracle Woman” and then reveals its flesh-and-blood counterpart, Mademoiselle Zeena (a past-her-blossom Joan Blondell), in a slow upwards zoom. Chin up, hand propped on popped hip, and eyes gazing off into a far-off distance, Zeena stands in a well-worn position. To the casual onlooker, she cuts both a seductive and enigmatic figure, but as a shadow flickers across her eyes, vulnerability escapes and her gaze goes to another well-cut figure. A slick-haired, muscled man moves through the crowd, his sweaty desperation palping through the film’s cool black-and-white cinematography. Overshadowing Zeena (figuratively and literally), this is carnival barker Stan Carlisle (Power), our anti-hero, our protagonist, our eyes for the rest of the film.
Seizing vulnerability as opportunity, Stan weasels his way into Zeena’s mind-reading act, alongside her and her alcoholic husband Pete (Ian Keith, reeking of ne’er-do-well). Wanting to move from pupil to partner, Stan attempts to woo Zeena away from Pete, romantically and professionally. Unable to break her, Stan does hear about Zeena and Pete’s “unbreakable” cold-reading code, back from when their act was a smash hit on the club circuit, thanks to his side piece, barely-clothed carnival ingenue Molly (bubbly and appealing Coleen Gray). As we come to learn, Stan gets what Stan wants, through whatever unsavoury means necessary.
With the code, Molly and a new suit, Stan makes his way to the big city and takes the nightclubs by storm as The Great Stanton. Like many great charlatans before (and after), he preys on the weak, hopeful and optimistic to garner praise, accolades and wealth. Rather than sticking to entertainer schtick, the unquenchable Stan begins to mold himself into a spiritual communicator and flirt with well-to-do psychologist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker sulking and smirking under a femme fatale wave of hair). Under this pretense, Stan stretches and falls by his own overreaching hand to an unconscionable depth. The film ends in poetic justice of grotesque proportions under a noir lens — neat, tidy and grim, like taking out the trash.
Underneath the A-list production value of a B-film plot, what really sets Nightmare Alley apart from other noirs (and makes it worthy of a revisit) is Tyrone Power’s soul-shattering performance as Stan Carlisle, a character our Edgar Chaput wrote could be seen as “more antagonist than protagonist.” On paper, there is no question that Stan is a bad man, tricking the poor to swindle the rich, but onscreen, Power commands your attention and sneaks some of your sympathy. As Stan rises through the ranks, Power oozes and ebbs sleek charisma until he hits a climactic peak as a shell of a man, more soulless than robotic, exuded not so much in slippery words but a certain breathlessness in a strong-statured body. When the table finally turns on Stan, Power furrows his head into his hands, letting the moment hang past tension into consuming emptiness, and the frame no longer focuses on Power’s magnetic brow but Stan’s broad scalp. Not only has he lost, but he is lost.
In the midst of post-war disillusionment, Nightmare Alley is an unsavoury exposé of con schemes, or those that prey on belief (or more apt in a film discussion, suspension of disbelief). Stan’s hubris-filled rise-and-fall (from magic tricks to spiritualism to psychology) reveals the tricks of the trade, shattering the illusions of both his onscreen and offscreen audience. While the film does mention God in passing, it does not denounce the Church but just those who corrupt the spirit world, revealing the utter uselessness of putting faith in a higher power presented to you by a fellow man, especially from outside of the establishment (or established religion). It’s this disillusionment that will resonate with current and future audiences the most, as the world continues to evolve with more choices as to what to believe in (or which way to be conned) and people continue to grapple for answers in an inherently chaotic existence. Funnily enough, William Lindsay Gresham (the author of the original novel) went on to join A.A. and Scientology, a member of the former and a renouncer of the latter at the time of his death in 1962.
The film landed with mixed reviews, with The New York Times’s Thomas M. Pryor writing, “despite some fine and intense acting by Mr. Power and others, this film traverses distasteful dramatic ground and only rarely does it achieve any substance as entertainment,” and poor box office, with Zanuck doing little publicity and pulling it out of theaters early. While Tyrone Power returned to studio clonkers like Captain from Castile and The Black Rose, Nightmare Alley gathered figurative dust, rare to hear about and even rarer to find as it was never released on VHS. That is until the early 2000s, when New York’s Cinema Village screened a 35mm copyin 2000 to critical reappreciation (The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman describing it as “[e]xcitingly tawdry, as well as self-defeatingly slick”) and Fox finally released it for home consumption in 2005 as part of their Fox Film Noir DVD series. It may have taken decades, but Nightmare Alley finally found an appreciative audience and now is considered categorically as a film noir classic.