THIS WEEK: NIGHTMARE ALLEY (1947) – Con artists in a creepy traveling carny show fuel a terrific noir about greed, faith and a doomed anti-hero. 

Storytellers have long tapped into the tale of Oedipus Rex for inspiration.  They are drawn not only to the more lurid revelations of murdering one’s father and marrying one’s mother (neither of which, sorry to disappoint, happen other than obliquely in this film), but to the time-tested themes of arrogance, denial of fate and a spiraling downward once the horrible truth of one’s sins is revealed.  The film noir was always, of course, a great place to explore a fall from grace, and Tyrone Power’s Nightmare Alley character, the carnival mentalist Stanton Carlisle, takes one of the more complete and inglorious falls of anyone in the genre when his bogus conjuring of spirits degenerates into a slap in the face of God. At one point, when it is mentioned to Stanton that he seems to really enjoy the fortune-telling racket, he replies, “Mister, I was made for it.”  Nightmare Alley is a great lost noir that goes deeply into the double meaning of that line of dialogue: what the unrepentant Stanton is also ‘made for’ is his inevitable slide into hell. 

It’s not hard to tell we are about to witness a man headed into his worst nightmare when, moments into his appearance on screen as a carnival barker, Power’s Stanton observes the tragic figure of the geek (you bet: a guy who bites the heads off chickens!) and wonders how anyone could ever get so low.  Sit back, viewers, the film you are about to see will slowly but surely answer that question.  Director Edmund Goulding, working from Jules Furthman’s adaptation of the William Lindsay Gresham novel, tells Stanton’s story in a series of long vignettes, with ominous seconds of silence and a fade to black punctuating the passage of time between scenes.  Lee Garmes’ striking black and white cinematography takes us through a myriad of settings and their accompanying moods as Stanton goes from the seedy carnival to a career as a high society psychic.  His escapades unfold in unexpected ways that keep the tension high and lend an almost epic feel to the journey.  After all, there is no reason to think that we will not be spending the entire movie at the carny, so when the film shifts gears into life among the cocktail set, we are on unsure footing, just like our over-confident protagonist—even though he has no idea of how unsure things really are. 

Power gives a great performance here as Stanton, a raw and angry man trying to claim something as his own.  He apparently fought to have the role as a way of staking out new dramatic territory for himself, and his willingness to dive into a dark character is clearly in evidence here.  He is ably assisted by the rest of the cast, especially Joan Blondell (that aforementioned obliquely Oedipal mother figure) as the phony psychic Zeena, a been-there-and-back gal who was herself part of a bigger, more successful mind-reading act before her philandering drove her husband Pete to the bottle and sent them back to the mud and tent circuit. Pete (the obliquely Oedipal murdered father) is played with sweet intensity by Ian Keith, in a heartbreaking portrayal of alcoholism, made even more sad by the fact that Zeena is still cheating on him, this time with Stanton.  Alcohol is a huge part of the concept of a downfall in this movie, and when Pete dies in a scenario unwittingly brought about by Stanton himself, Stanton schemes to get the lucrative “code” from Zeena; a series of “tells” used between mentalist and assistant which give the audience the appearance of true psychic ability.  Stanton needs a beautiful assistant, though, so it isn’t long before he dumps Zeena and gloms onto Molly, (the distinctive Coleen Gray), who works the sideshow as Elektra, the amazing conductor of electrical current.  Together, they move up to the big city supper clubs, where Stanton dupes a local psychotherapist (well-realized as the archetypal ice princess by Helen Walker) into letting him use information from her sessions to hook the wealthy into believing he somehow knows all about them.  When one multi-millionaire believes Stanton can bring his wife back from the dead, things start getting hairy and Stanton sees no harm in bilking people as long as he can be their God-like savior.  Oh, what fools these mortals be.

Nightmare Alley is loaded with classic noir patter and atmosphere, but it transcends cliché by staying on track with its grander thesis: that should we decide to try and manipulate the Gods to our own ends, fate will make sure we have been doomed from the very beginning and don’t even know it.  Several times, a deck of Tarot cards lets us know that Stanton will likely come to a bad end.  And the excellent scene in which Stanton’s mind games are thrown back in his face and force him into his eventual ruin is one of the great noir payoffs.  It provides the opening gun to an extended epilogue that details exactly how Stanton ends up as the thing he most feared becoming.

Noir gave conventional Hollywood films an excuse to get at a little bit of underbelly with its subject matter about society’s outcasts engaged in nefarious activities.  This film is even more notable because it takes those elements and switches them out of the usual heist or private eye arena into a wholly original milieu that is an ideal match for the genre’s sensibilities.  Take a stroll down Nightmare Alley.  You may never return!

James Napoli is an author, filmmaker and teacher whose third book Violation! The Ultimate Ticket Book will be released in April.