as noir as it gets : Nightmare Alley (1947)

    Nightmare Alley. Beverly Hills: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment,  2005 [DVD]. Edmund Goulding, director. Performers: Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Ian Keith, Helen Walker, Mike Mazurki. Originally released as a motion picture in 1947. Based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham.

   Summary: Stanton Carlisle is an ambitious carnival huckster who plays scams alongside phony mentalist Zeena and her alcoholic husband Pete, working the crowd as Zeena pretends to read their minds. But Stan has no intention of staying with the carnival; he has his heart set on an upscale night club act.

Elsewhere I’ve opined that, and with no disrespect to Double Indemnity, Out of the Past,  and the other usual suspects in the noir canon, Asphalt Jungle may be the best noir of them all. However … I may have to revise my assessment, and were I to pick a film today that goes to the heart of noir deeper and more relentlessly than any other, my choice would be Nightmare Alley. And as an aside, if there is a genre we might dub carnival noir, then Nightmare Alley is the ne plus ultra.

I’ve not read the novel on which the film is based, but if it’s true to it’s repute - that it’s even darker than the film - then the novel is very dark indeed. An interesting paradox is that for such a unremittingly bleak, cynical story, several of the pivotal characters – Zeena, Bruno, Pete, Molly, Mrs. Prescott – while having a few not so admirable shadings, are basically good and likeable.

  In any case carnival huckster turned spiritual adviser to the rich Stanton Carlisle was reportedly Power’s favorite role, and rightly so. It’s his performance of a career, a rare opportunity to showcase how good and multifaceted an actor he really was. Stan Carlisle is the dark mirror to the character of Larry Darrell which Power played in The Razor’s Edge only a year before: both are seeking a vague mystical something though each takes a different path with attendant results.

The supporting performances in Nightmare Alley are so good it’s difficult to single one out, though I’m partial to the great Joan Blondell as the tarot reader and Stan’s sometime girlfriend Zeena. NA is also noteworthy in its depiction of the destructive attitudes of the characters toward spirituality and psychic phenomena. Not that this was necessarily shocking or unique: in the 1940s the subgenre of supernatural noir had several films that feature offbeat, sometimes unhealthy, attitudes toward the otherworldly. The Spiritualist, Uninvited, The Seventh Victim, I Walked with a Zombie, The Night has a Thousand Eyes are among the more notable examples.

But getting back to the noir element: Hitchcock famously observed that a thriller is only as good as its villain, and in like manner it might be said that a film noir is only as good as its femme fatale. And here we’ve got a doozy. No, it’s not the seemingly obvious choice of the exotically garbed Zeena: as aforementioned she’s basically decent and looking out for Stan’s best interests, even if her methods are unorthodox (reading the tarot cards). Rather, our true femme fatale is the duplicitous, über-unethical psychiatrist Lilith Ritter (brilliantly played by Helen Walker). She’s one of the meanest women in noir, right up there with Phyllis Dietrichson of Double Indemnity and Kathie Moffett of Out of the Past.

And it would be remiss to overlook the dark chocolate blackout look of Nightmare Alley, with much credit going to director Edmund Goulding and cinematographer Lee Garmes. In Nightmare Alley the prowling camera takes us to the bowels of the carnival gestalt, creating a, well, nightmarish, surreal landscape that, in eminently noir-like fashion, often suggests – and conceals – much more than it reveals.