Nightmare Alley (1947) is a grim film noir, bleak and mostly uncompromising. It was presented by Eddie Mueller on January 8, 2022 on TCM's Noir Alley -- the timing of this broadcast is designed to complement Guillermo del Toro's remake of the picture that premiered in early December 2021. The '47 version is certainly fascinating and fun to watch. But it's a rather dogged, literal-minded picture and doesn't really soar, despite some wonderful performances. I've seen this picture several times, always liked it in principal, but questioned the somewhat cautious studio-bound execution. The movie is about criminal hubris : a petty hustler in a carnival aspires to big-time fraud and, ultimately, pays the price for his pretensions. The crooks in High Society turn out to be even more wicked and clever than the con artists in the lower depths and, needless, to says the protagonist is punished for the crimes that we have enjoyed watching him commit in the first three-quarters of the movie.
Tyrone Power, a famous Matinee idol in his time, plays Stan (short for Stanton) an ambitious, penny-ante grifter. Stan works for a mud-show carnival, assisting Zeena, a mind-reader, fortune-teller, and prophetess for hire. (Zeena is played by Joan Blondell in some alarmingly form-fitting garments -- one white number that seems painted onto her derriere shows just about anything you might want to see and would earn the film an R-rating today.) The members of the carnival are cheerfully corrupt and Stan, in particular, is sleeping with Zeena (who is married to a dying alcoholic) and, also, hoping to seduce the show's "Electric Woman", Polly who is the girlfriend of the show's 'strong man' (Mike Mazurski who is always effective as a thuggish brute, one of Hollywood's great character actors). Zeena has mastered a complicated code used to communicate information during mind-reading acts -- it was invented by her drunkard husband. The carnival has a Geek whom we only see howling in the far distance when he periodically runs amuck. When Stan says that he wonders how a man could stoop so low to play the part of a carnival Geek, the audience instinctively knows what's in store for our hero. (The mood is similar to the opening scenes in the cabaret in The Blue Angel when Emil Janning's Professor Unrat catches a glimpse of a mournful clown and we wonder how someone ends up so humiliated and abject -- well, we are about to find out.) Zeena's husband accidentally drinks wood alcohol used in her stage show (she burns up messages from the audience with a match dropped into the ETHOH -- but only after her confederates in the "cubby" under the stage have read the texts and inscribed answers to the rubes' questions on a chalkboard. The movie has lots of interesting inside information about how carnival acts function. The novelist who wrote the story was himself a carny and knew this sort of arcana.) Stan has inadvertently caused the death of Zeena's husband -- he gives him the wrong bottle maybe "accidentally on purpose" as is sometimes said. Stan convinces Zeena to teach him the code but, after he is caught making love to Polly, the Strong Man's girl -- the carnies force him to marry her. It seems that they have their own code of honor. Stan and Polly become famous for a mentalism act, The Great Stanton, and perform inexplicably in a huge night club with a dance-floor, band, and half-a-hundred tables occupied by wealthy customers. Stan figures out that he can exploit his talents by offering seances to high-paying customers. He encounters an enigmatic woman who turns out to be a psychologist -- she's also a grifter but much more ambitious: she records sessions with her wealthy patrons, impressing their confessions onto vinyl disks, presumably to blackmail her them She makes an alliance with Stan and together they plot to inveigle money from an oligarch who longs to see an old, deceased girlfriend. Stan persuades Polly to appear as a ghostly visitation from the dead maiden, but she's too simple and virtuous for this kind of corruption and ruins the spectral spectacle. There's a fight and the elderly rich man is killed. Stan has to abandon Polly. He's betrayed by the psychologist who makes off with $150,000 conned from her patient -- the money is to be used to build a spiritualism tabernacle. Stan turns into a drunk and hobo. In the end, there's only one profession open to him - you can guess what it is.
This sounds like good lurid fun and it mostly is. But the film is a bit prudish about showing us what we want to see -- namely, the chicken-chewing antics of a professional geek. Power looks horrible as a drunk, his face contorted, wrinkles encasing his drooping eyes, and his clothing encrusted in filth. But the picture spares him the ultimate indignity. Furthermore, at the end, when Stan has run amuck, apparently something that always happens with Geeks, Polly seems to come to his rescue -- it turns out he's joined the show where she's working. (This seems implausible and is obviously a sop to studio heads who felt the picture needed at least the glimmer of a happy ending.) Visually, the movie is unimpressive, which is unfortunate since the carnival milieu is amenable to all sorts of interesting expressionistic effects (see, for instance, Bergman's venture into this same terrain in Sawdust and Tinsel). There's some spooky supernatural stuff involving Tarot card readings but this is all pretty predictable. The imagery doesn't really match the scary dire dimensions of the plot. The novelist who wrote this book, also called Nightmare Alley was William Gresham, an ex-carny himself. Curiously, Gresham died of alcoholism in he early sixties in the same flea-bag hotel where he wrote the book twenty years earlier. Gresham's wife was Jo Davidson who left him to marry, of all people, C. S. Lewis -- there's a book and novel about that relationship called Shadowlands. There are some hilarious scenes-- in one Stan convinces a low-rent local sheriff come to bust the show (or earn some bribes) that Polly as Electra, the Electric Woman, must wear almost no clothing or the electricity that surges through her when she sits in her gimcrack electric chair would roast her alive. Stan has a con where he has men remember their childhood and mysteriously knows about them roaming in the green hills with a much beloved dog. It's the dog detail that hooks the rubes -- but, as Stan says, "Every boy had a dog."
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