Nightmare Alley

When creative people get to make the movies they really want to make, strange things can happen. Flush from his success with The Razor's Edge, Tyrone Power lobbied Darryl F. Zanuck to play the lead role in this creepy, very anti-glamorous movie about carnivals con games, fake mentalism and predatory spiritualism. The film abounds with unpalatable people and unpleasant ideas, and its sordid carny background seems authentic. Even more disturbing is its very noir atmosphere of moral defeat and universal venality. In other words, Nighmare Alley is one special movie.

Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) helps Zeena (Joan Blondell) with her cheap mentalist act because her alcoholic husband Pete (Ian Keith) is too sodden to perform before the public. He gets Zeena to share Pete's valuable code-based trick, and beautiful carny performer Molly (Coleen Gray) learns it as well. Strongman Bruno (Mike Mazurki) isn't happy about that, but after Pete falls to an unfortunate accident, events transpire so that Molly and Stanton marry and leave the carnival for Chicago and a successful nightclub routine. Stanton combines Zeena's code with his personal intuition to build a substantial reputation as a mentalist, and is aided by the mysteriously suave consulting psychiatrist Lilith Ritter in spreading his influence among the North Shore elite. He sets himself up as a spiritual conduit to the afterlife, as a way of fleecing wealthy people who have lost loved ones. Suddenly offered vast fortunes by gullible millionaires, Stanton feels he can do no wrong and coerces Molly into aiding him in the cruelest swindle of all.
Nightmare Alley was a huge flop on release, only to become a notorious 'film to see' when a legal hassle made it a scarce item. Savant saw it once in the 1980s (in a class given by one of the disc commentators, James Ursini) and that was a privately owned print.

It's easy to see why Darryl Zanuck underpromoted Nightmare Alley do it would not sully Tyrone Power's star image. Not since Freaks had there been a show as revealing about the underside of the carnival racket. Postwar audiences were ready for tougher themes, but few wanted to know what a Geek is, let alone see their favorite matinee idol transformed into one.

Nightmare Alley is about swindles, confidence games and other abuses of trust. Stanton Carlisle learns the craft of fleecing suckers on the carny circuit, a talent that makes him feel like a privileged insider, with all the rubes on the outside. He learns from the best but his ambitions take him even higher. As soon as he has a legitimate and profitable entertainment act going, he misjudges his own powers and overreaches. He knows he has a special talent when he dares to run a con on a sheriff threatening the carnival. With that success, he thinks he can get away with fooling everyone. People expect to be tricked in a sideshow booth and will chuckle pleasantly when a stage magician pulls off apparent miracles on stage. But they don't take kindly to tricksters exploiting their personal problems to raise false hopes for monetary gain. The moment Stanton starts playing with a vulnerable old woman (Julia Dean of Curse of the Cat People), he crosses that line. She misses her daughter and falls for Stanton's claims that he can communicate with her from the next life.

Stanton discards Zeena and dismisses Molly. When he deceives other people he isolates himself, and when he drops his friends he's left alone with his own imperfect psyche. He has issues of guilt - at one point he owns up to his selfishness - and he starts to believe in the superstitious Tarot cards that Zeena allows to run her life. The trickster is himself easily tricked.

Carlisle meets his match in the sphinx-like Lilith, a crafty player who never reveals her game. He admits that his mentalism is a racket, but the slick psychoanalyst never admits to anything. She may very well have lured him for her own purposes. Stanton discovers the recordings she makes of her patients and would love to use them as fuel for his confidence games. The question is, how completely corrupt is she? It's difficult to tell when Stanton are being sincere, but figuring out what's on Lilith's superior mind is an impossibility.

Stanton is a troubled mix of villain and flawed hero. He admits he's a crook but claims he's only accepting money offered by people who can spare it. He scoffs at Zeena's cards and Lilith's psychoanalysis, but in the end believes in them both. He's the master of what he calls 'the Gypsy switch' - misdirecting the rubes - but is himself fooled by his own tricks when he trusts the treacherous Lilith.

1947 audiences doubtlessly found Stanton's final con games to be distasteful in the extreme, especially when he breaks his own rules and allows the concept of God to enter his spiel. That blasphemy is what spooks Molly and causes disaster for Stanton's plans. Ironically, the fact that his blasphemous behavior triggers Stanton's immediate downfall might be the very reason that the production code censors okay'ed this edgy story.

Stanton's rise and fall follows the same symmetrical pattern of Alex in A Clockwork Orange (thank you David Gaudio) - the last scenes of the film mirror the beginning as Stanton returns to the carnival to accept his 'predestined' fate. Almost like the engineer in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Stanton's line "Mister, I was made for it ..." is a chilling refrain. We've already heard foreshadowings for Stanton in the form of a haunting audio sampling of the Geek's screams, weirdly layered over a few scene fadeouts. Of all the losers in film noir, it's hard to think of any brought lower than Stanton Carlisle. The horrible deaths in films like Night and the City and Criss Cross seem preferable to this dreadful fate. I can also see 1947 audiences looking at each other when the lights came up and asking, "Did I just see what I thought I saw?" Mainstream movies as elegantly sick as this one wouldn't become common until the 1970s.

Tyrone Power's acting is remarkable; he convinces totally as a supremely clever trickster who doesn't know his own limitations. Joan Blondell has her best role after her Warners heyday, and even Coleen Gray (Red River, The Killing) is impressive as the one character with an unshakeable sense of ethics. It's the best role for the haunting Helen Walker, who makes Lilith Ritter an irresistably powerful woman, and a manipulator who never shows her cards until the time comes to spring the ultimate trap. Mike Mazurki has one of his few roles as a likeable fellow, and Ian Keith is frighteningly real as a confirmed alcoholic. Audiences were barely used to taboo-breaking alcoholic characters in movies; The Lost Weekend was only two years old. Nightmare Alley is a little more honest about what real degradation through booze might be like, and very honest about the moral complexity of evil.

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