Nightmare Alley (1947)

                                 Swearing, steaming, sweating, scheming, bribing,

                                 bellowing, cheating, the carny went its way. It came

                                 like a pillar of fire by night, bringing excitement and

                                 new things into the drowsy towns- lights and noise and

                                 the chance to win an Indian blanket, to ride on the ferris

                                 wheel, to see the wild man who fondles those rep-tiles as

                                 a mother would fondle her babes. Then it vanished in the

                                 night, leaving the trodden grass of the field and the debris

                                 of popcorn boxes and rusting tin ice-cream spoons to show

                                 where it had been.

                                                           -William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley

The film Nightmare Alley laid in copyright limbo for over fifty years, a struggle between the estates of producer George Jessel, author W.L. Gresham and the 20^th Century Fox Film Corporation. In that time, its cult status continued to grow. Not just from the rarity of its screenings on television and at film festivals, but from the later suicides of the book’s author and the movie’s director, and its remarkably grim, bold, and disturbing look at hucksterism and its milieu.

It was 1946 and Tyrone Power, Fox’s leading male star, had returned from service in World War II. From an acting family and a stage background, he had grown tired of the empty “pretty boy” image that had made him a matinee idol. He wanted a different role. One that would showcase his range and depth and change the public’s (and industry’s) perception of him from a toothpaste ad to a serious actor. He had leaned toward that end with his first post-war duty role by playing Larry Darrell in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.

Power leveraged his past success (and the considerable money he made for the studio) to make Nightmare Alley his prestige project. Studio Head Daryl F. Zanuck was against it from the start but he owed Power gratitude and a bit of artistic license so he green-lighted the film. Ultimately, Zanuck’s instincts would prove correct (as they so often did). The film failed miserably at the box office and Power ended up returning to the adventurous, swashbuckling roles that had made him famous. Interestingly, many of 20^th Century Fox’s most unique and enduring pictures were made in this vein, by a proven film artist’s passionate plea and Zanuck’s begrudging nod.

War weary audiences of the late ‘40s were not ready for it. Although film noir was seeping into the mainstream, an “A” picture starring the dashing and overwhelmingly handsome Tyrone Power as a greedy, manipulative charlatan was too much for them. Adding to this shock was the story, adapted from a novel immersed in the sleazy world of carny, portraying the darker realities of alcoholism, marital infidelity, religion, spiritualism and ambition by an author who was a known communist, drunkard and wife beater.

Author William Lindsay Gresham spent an impressionable period of his childhood in Brooklyn, where he first developed his lifelong infatuation with the carny lifestyle at Coney Island. In the 1930s, he became a volunteer medic in the Spanish Civil War, fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade for the anti-fascist Republican forces. Here he met Joseph Daniel “Doc” Halliday, a former sideshow worker, who regaled Gresham with stories and tricks of the carny trade. These conversations would fuel the majority of Gresham’s work for the rest of his life. Upon his return to the States, Gresham suffered a bout of tuberculosis and a failed suicide attempt. He was drinking heavily. In 1942, while working as an editor for various true crime pulp magazines, he married poet and writer Joy Davidman. With her encouragement, he wrote Nightmare Alley, which was published in 1946 to surprising success. The couple became ardent fans of C.S. Lewis and converted to Christianity, but Gresham’s thirst for drink and proneness to violence forced Davidman to flee with their two children to England where they found solace and a new life with none other than C.S. Lewis. This relationship was the basis for the play Shadowlands, later made into the Anthony Hopkins/Debra Winger film of 1993.

Gresham penned two other non-fiction books involving carny life and mentalism, 1954’s Monster Midway and a biography of Houdini in 1959. Gresham’s suicide in 1962 was committed in the same hotel in which he stayed while writing Nightmare Alley sixteen years earlier.

The novel was toned down for the screen. The anti-religious overtones (the main character is an ordained minister), “freak” attractions, open sexuality, illegal abortion, and subtle condemnation of capitalism were watered down for the more modest tastes of movie audiences.

Even with this sublimation, the film still packs a surprising wallop.

Powers plays Stan Carlisle, a roustabout for the “Ten-in-one” show of a traveling carnival. He’s young, spirited and has aspirations for something more in his life. One night the carny’s geek, in the throes of an alcohol-induced freak out, begins screaming and running amok. Stan ominously wonders, “How can a guy get so low?”

In the grand cosmos of fate and desire, he is sure to find the answer.

He insinuates himself into the relationship of a husband and wife team of soothsayers named Zeena and Pete (Joan Blondell and Ian Keith). Zeena is the stage persona and Pete (once a headliner, now afflicted by alcoholism) is her increasingly incapable assistant in the shadows. Wanting in on the smalltime limelight, Stan begins an affair with Zeena and plies Pete with booze, mistakenly poisoning him (Freud would disagree) when a bottle of wood alcohol shows up in the mix. He brushes up on his “cold reading” skills (the type of “psychic” nonsense currently performed by John Edward and Sylvia Browne) and becomes Zeena’s new partner. Stan learns “the code” of chicanery that Pete perfected and the duo begins to fleece the rubes.

His ambition cannot be sated however. Tiring of the dime grift and high off a “Jerk-em-to-Jesus” ruse on a bullying sheriff, he beds down young Molly (Coleen Gray), another act at the carny. In a strange display of carny sexual ethics, (more so to the adherence of the Hays Code) the two are forced to leave the show.

Molly learns “the code”. She and the “Great Stanton” (as Stan now bills himself) come into fame, prestige, and money as a mentalist act in Chicago nightclubs. It is still not enough for Stan. He wants to bilk the clubs’ rich clientele with a spiritualist act. With the assistance of psychologist-to-the-wealthy Lilith Ritter (a cunning turn by Helen Walker), whom he impressed at one of his shows, he devises cons which prey upon the grief and gullibility of a well-to-do businessman and his social circle.

Of course, this is film noir and something must go terribly wrong.

Despite the film’s use of standard noir themes and visuals, Nightmare Alley continually veers off into nontraditional territory. Power’s Stan, albeit an anti-hero, is a surprisingly upbeat sort, a reprehensible grifter with a heart of gold. He is remarkably good natured and forgiving. He constantly sees the upside of his setbacks, truly cares for his wife Molly, and wants only to take the money of contemptible, elitist rich people. On the affability meter, Stan hovers slightly above Andy Griffith’s “Lonesome” Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd (1957) and is quite a few ethical miles higher than Burt Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry (1960). His true flaw is a common one among con artists, thieves and evangelists, an innate disdain for people who are easily duped. This trait ultimately proves to be his undoing.

All three women in Stan’s life behave atypically for females in a noir film. Zeena, victimized by Stan through the death of her husband and his fling with Molly, forgives him and moves on, choosing to remain friends despite Stan’s continual violations of the carny code of ethics.

Lilith is a strange spin on the femme fatale. She’s a society dame, a respected psychologist, possesses an ambiguity of gender in dress, manner and speech, and is mentally (and perhaps ethically) superior to Stan. Sure, she’s cutthroat, conniving and duplicitous but she’s so damn professional about it all. The film even leaves her character with an open-ended possibility of decency and professional concern for Stan as his world (and mind) begins to unravel.

Molly is the most traditional of the women but even her dutiful, loving, and naïve nature (she played a similar role to Sterling Hayden in Kubrick’s The Killing) will not allow her to bend fully to Stan’s will. In the end, it is Molly’s kindness and sense of morality that becomes both Stan’s undoing and possible salvation.

It is one of the few film noirs where all the female leads survive relatively unscathed from either their own treachery (Lilith) or abuse at the hands of men (Zeena and Molly). In fact, here, they are all empowered from their encounters with Stan.

Edmund Goulding was a strange choice to helm the picture. An actor, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and composer, his refined taste was better fitted for the mannered romantic melodramas (Grand Hotel (1932), Of Human Bondage (1946), Dark Victory (1939)) that built his reputation as a director for actresses (He worked with Bette Davis early and often). After working with Goulding on Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1946), Power specifically requested him to direct the picture. It was all part of Power’s image change to serious actor.

Goulding pulled it off.

He had the assistance of cinematographer Lee Garmes (Scarface (1932), Duel in the Sun (1946), and Portrait of Jeannie in 1948) and screenwriter Jules Furthman (The Big Sleep (1946), To Have and Have Not (1944), and many of Marlene Deitrich’s films with Josef von Sternberg). Goulding seamlessly blended the seedy, sweaty road life of the carnival with the posh nightclubs, offices, and manors of Chicago’s North Shore. The frame, at times, is almost completely black. Jagged images reveal motives and character. Single source lighting elongates the shadows of the carnies and partially hides the gruesome figure of the geek, whose screams are a recurring theme that haunts Stan throughout the film. In Lilith’s office, far away from the darkness and smells of the carnival, window blinds form a shadowy web of deceit across the walls and her knowing face. The decidedly stylized feel contains enough elements of the horror film to add a whole other dimension to the picture.

The film’s real strength is in its cynicism and skeptical insistence that all forms of groundless “wish-think”- god, religion, ghosts, afterlife, Tarot, psychic phenomena, ESP, and even psychology- are equally fraudulent. Each one preys on the fearful, the lonely, the naïve, the bereaved, the indoctrinated, and the dumb. It’s the selling of fairy tales for cash and control.

Nightmare Alley’s genius is in its honesty to take us behind the scenes and become willing participants in the scam.

Like the barker tells Stan at the outset, “In the carny you don’t ask nothing. And you’ll get told no lies.”