Nightmare Alley (1947)

Film: Nightmare Alley (1947)
Stars: Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, Ian Keith
Director: Edmund Goulding
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

I want to admit right now two things about this series-I did not watch these movies in chronological order, and that I frequently refer to movies on this list as "surprisingly bleak."  While I'd always been a connoisseur of film noir, as it'd been my favorite genre, going into some of the "deeper cut" classics that have littered throughout this month, I came to realize that the lower budget you got, the more likely that it would turn into a film like Detour, so black that there's no redemption for the main characters.  Which made Nightmare Alley a surprise for me.  Nightmare Alley had a proper budget, rare for a film of the era, and had legitimate, established stars like Tyrone Power & Joan Blondell in the leads.  The film was a flop at the time, perhaps because it is exceedingly grim (with one more film to go in my screenings, it's by far the grimmest of all of the movies we'll profile this month), which makes its rescue from critics all the more remarkable.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Stan Carlisle (Power), a man who serves as a carnival barker, and must be a recent hire as he's fascinated by everything at the carnival, particularly the act between a husband and wife team of Zeena (Blondell) and Pete (Keith), as well as an unseen "Geek" who serves an almost inhuman lifestyle, taking hits of booze or drugs as payment for opening the freak act, biting the heads off of live chickens.  Stan wonders how a man could stoop to such a level, foreshadowing that could have been less clunky in my opinion.  Stan accidentally kills Pete, who is an alcoholic by switching his moonshine with wood alcohol, and takes over in the mind-reading act with Zeena, also romancing her.  He's more interested in the younger Molly (Gray, an actress who went to my alma mater!) and marries her after he's caught having sex with her (it's just kissing in Nightmare Alley, but we know what's up).  Eventually he recasts Zeena with Molly in their act and starts performing night club events, teaming up with a corrupt psychiatrist Lilith Ritter (Walker), who makes a tape of him confessing to guilt over Pete's death behind his back.  Lilith & Stan team up, using the secret tapings Lilith makes of all of her wealthiest clients to convince Stan he can speak with the dead, and it almost works until Molly confesses to one of the clients that she is not his dead lover (he sees her as a spirit from a long distance), ruining Stan's plan, and Lilith runs off with all of the money Stan has by blackmailing him, saying she'll say he's mentally disturbed if he tries to take the money. Molly returns to the circus, and Stan, ruined, turns to alcohol, becoming such an addict that he has to, you guessed it, become a "geek" in the same carnival.

The movie ends differently than the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, where Stan is clearly doomed to drink himself to death as a geek.  Here, Stan is reunited with Molly, though it might end up being the same finale, and honestly worse for her as it echoes the enabling relationship between Zeena & Pete from the beginning of the movie.  Stan is destined to die a terrible death, at best emulating Pete as he'll clearly never recover, and in the process Molly's dreams are dashed (since she'll give up her youth taking care of a ruined man rather than trying to find a nice, capable guy to settle down with).  This sort of bleakness is shocking, especially against the moral nastiness displayed by pretty much everyone other than Molly in this film.

Blondell's Zeena ultimately cares for her husband, but is punished for straying into the arms of the handsome Stan (even though he's a sneaky, eventually drunk con man, he still looks like Tyrone Power so you can't really blame a girl) by having him die & her getting screwed out of their code.  Best of all, though, is Walker's Lilith.  Walker gives her a hardened femme fatale, someone who is smarter than Stan even though he doesn't realize it (and quite frankly neither does the audience at first), and who in a rare circumstance gets away with her crimes.  She packs up with the cash, selling out her profession and perhaps her soul, but she doesn't die or get anything other than the easy life after bilking the precious memories of her rich clients.  I'm struggling to think of a character this morally bankrupt in this era that pretty much gets away with everything, and I can't.  I don't know how this didn't run afoul of the Hays Code, but it might be the best corollary I've ever seen of what would eventually become a staple of neo-noir: the victorious villain.

Previous Films in the Series: Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep