Nightmare Alley
Our film this week is Nightmare Alley, from 1947, and it’s a strange one. As I’ve said before, the last few programs in our 18-week series of film noir are going to contain some really offbeat and unclassifiable stuff. And Nightmare Alley isn’t just unusual, it’s unique.
It’s unique because it’s a big-budget major release from an important studio, Twentieth Century Fox, which has the story of a trashy B-movie. Nightmare Alley stars Tyrone Power, who’d been Fox’s biggest moneymaking actor for a decade, and its director was Edmund Goulding, who was a veteran of silent cinema with a long list of credits including such stately productions as Grand Hotel, Dark Victory and The Razor’s Edge. Power had mostly appeared in big costume pictures, and Goulding was highly regarded as a director of actresses. So it’s a big surprise to find both of them even assigned to a production like Nightmare Alley, never mind throwing themselves into it with such fervor. Because the whole world this movie portrays is sleazy and unedifying in the extreme. It starts in the nether reaches of the carnival midway, where hucksters and freaks devote themselves wearily to cheap tricks of illusion or degrading spectacles of monstrosity. The Tyrone Power character is Stanton Carlisle, a graduate of the orphanage and the reform school who’s strongly attracted to the idea of duping the yokels. He also expresses a fascination with the most debased and horrible spectacle on the midway, the “geek,” who bites the heads off live chickens in return for a bottle a day and a place to sleep it off, and who periodically gets the DT’s and runs screaming through the night.
Stanton is a young man of talent and energy and not too many scruples, and it’s his ambition to rise from the seedy world of the carnival up through the social classes by the practise of illusion and fakery of the most theatrical kind. In his progress his constant need is to manipulate and mislead people, in both his professional and personal life, and he runs the ever-present risk of disaster in both spheres.
But I don’t want to give away too much of the plot of this fascinating movie, because it develops in ways that you wouldn’t at all necessarily predict. What I can say is that the spectacle is almost always far more—I won’t say cynical, but sardonic and knowing, and finally serious, than the vast majority of Hollywood movies. The movie is glued to a behind-the-scenes view of things: a view that knows how all the wires are pulled and all the effects are produced—and how all the suckers are taken. Especially in the carnival scenes which form kind of the home base of the movie, it’s not just the highly dubious morality of this stuff that’s shocking, it’s the pervasive air of the cheapest sensationalism, the focus on the lowest and most vulgar forms of human interest. In the end it’s as if the whole world becomes a domain ruled by primitive curiosity and superstition, a kind of place of degradation. And it’s engrossing, too, to watch Stanton, the movie’s arch-manipulator, himself feeling the tug of superstition and fate, at one level unable to separate himself from the marks he’s deluding.
There are so many things about Nightmare Alley that seem to disqualify it as film noir: the A-budget production and matinee-idol star, the absence of the city and violent crime, even the ingredient of spiritualism in the story. In lots of ways the movie just seems far more mainstream, far less of a genre piece, than 95% of film noir. But there’s an unnerving, creepy feeling about this movie. As I said, the whole thing is grossly unedifying—even disturbing, upsetting. If the elements aren’t typical noir elements, they are sometimes typical Expressionist elements—the carnival settings, the mentalism and spiritualism, the spectre of horrific human debasement and loss of self as a kind of living damnation.
Again, the look of the movie isn’t exactly noir—but it is sometimes moody and threatening, shadowy and haunting in ways that are fully compatible with noir while really tracing their lineage more directly to the Expressionist ancestors of the noir look. The cameraman here is Lee Garmes, a consummate professional who had done beautiful work in the silent period and collaborated with Josef von Sternberg during the 30s on some of the most ravishing-looking black-and-white movies ever made. In Nightmare Alley the cinematography has that high studio gloss that covered mainstream Hollywood films throughout the 30s and 40s, a beautiful refinement and sheen that you see very clearly for example in the nightclub scenes later in the movie. But Garmes can also produce a wonderfully rich atmosphere of darkness and doom when the occasion requires it.
Some things in Nightmare Alley have dated noticeably. For instance, it’s hard to imagine a time when a woman wearing Coleen Gray’s actually rather modest two-piece outfit could be busted for indecent exposure, as she is here. And recent cinema has given us much more explicit makeup and special effects in the depiction of the physical effects of human dereliction. But the movie can still make a real impression. At the very least the strange conjunction of debased story values and elevated production values creates an effect unlike any other Hollywood movie I can think of. Nightmare Alley is a film I think you’re going to have a very personal reaction to, and maybe one that you might not be able to identify or evaluate very clearly. It’s a real curiosity—and I’d say it’s an impressive one.
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One commentator says about this movie: “Nightmare Alley is the quintessential B movie spoiled by an A production.” And you can kind of see what he means. The storyline is of course The Rise and Fall of Stanton Carlisle, but there’s something kind of primitive and extreme about the extent of the change, and the delirious depths that lie at the bottom. Carlisle goes from young carney hand on the make to nightclub headliner to powerful spiritualist, and then crashes down, not just to earth, but right through the floor to the sleaziest sub-basement imaginable—he’s the Geek. This in itself is sensational, you might say it’s cheap sensation. The carnival environment itself is sensational. The world of cheap hucksters and alcoholic total casualties extends all the way to geekdom and other freakish conditions that are strictly beyond the pale for middle-class art, or even entertainment, and flower only in the lumpen-levels of culture otherwise populated by The National Enquirer and Ed Wood. “Elizabeth Taylor Has One-Eyed Alien Baby!” “Famous Spiritualist Bites Heads Off Chickens!” Even the phoney spiritualism, the “spook racket,” occupies this world. And so does the movie itself, to some extent, when it points to the fateful coincidences surrounding the Tarot cards. Woooo, the guy is eaten by the same uncanny forces he made a living out of faking, it’s like something out of Tales From the Crypt. All this is definitely B-movie territory, if not Z-movie territory, so as I said you can understand where somebody might feel that this piece of raw sensationalism might be smothered in too much budget, too much refinement and civility.
But my feeling is that the opposite is true. As I was saying before the movie, what really distinguishes Nightmare Alley is exactly this unlikely meeting of a trashy story and A-movie trappings like Tyrone Power, Edmund Goulding and the Fox Art Direction department. And I’d even say that this inappropriate level of expenditure and glossy craftsmanship is what makes the movie really creepy. As a cheap production it would have been a chilling little shocker, a drive-in movie you could have felt a patronising affection for because it was completely unpretentious and had no chance of attracting general attention. But it’s truly unnerving to see all this stuff unfolding in a big-budget major release, to see Tyrone Power caught up in this world of primitive appetites and superstitions and ending as the lowest circus freak. The story perpetrates outrages to decorum that no amount of big-budget gloss can cover up—that actually are emphasized by the simultaneous presence of these cinematic markers of respectability. The slicker Stanton’s nightclub act is, the more sophisticated the impression created by Lilith Ritter, the psychiatrist who cheerfully collaborates in the defrauding of her patients, the more disturbing the movie gets. If you only had cheap nightclubs and cheap psychiatrists—which is all you ever could have in a B-movie no matter how hard you dressed them up—the effect wouldn’t be the same.
And I actually think Nightmare Alley succeeds in its more serious aims, as well. You don’t have to be stricken with the thrill of sacrilege, as the characters—and possibly also the movie—are at the notion of Stanton taking the Lord’s name in vain and risking a thunderbolt from God—you don’t have to actually feel this yourself, to appreciate how appropriate it is that this professed total skeptic feels it. This is simply the culmination of the movie’s nice pattern of melancholy ironies which begins with old alcoholic Pete seeing a boy running barefoot through the fields—a vision that is simultaneously a con-artist’s pitch and the very soul of something innocent and powerful. In the same way, Stanton repudiates everything they taught him in boyhood at the religious orphanage and boarding-school, but that’s precisely where he gets his sense of sacrilege. And his own repressed belief in the Tarot cards is right there behind his scoffing and his using of people’s superstitions to pull the wool over their eyes. It’s a simple point, in the end—the selfish man who tries to be an unbeliever is finally consumed by the failure of his own skepticism. But Nightmare Alley gives this simple point, this, you might even say, fundamentally religious point, a lot of force.
Certainly the film brings out the best in all its creators. Edmund Goulding never directed a more interesting movie, and Power, usually a pretty limited actor, is almost great in a part that uses his pretty-boy looks and slightly artificial manner in the most destructive way possible. Is it film noir? Again, as with Hangover Square last week, you have to say it isn’t by the strictest definition. But it has a dark side, that’s for sure, and it has style and conviction in the pursuit of a project that’s way off the main road. That’s enough for me.