Friday, December 18, 2020

Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley (1947), screenplay by Jules Furthman based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, directed by Edmund Goulding.

Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power, playing against his usual romantic-hero type) is a carny, drifting along and looking for a hustle. Trading on his good looks, he seduces the sideshow psychic Zeena (Joan Blondell) and tries to get her to reveal the secret code she used in her mind-reading act with her husband Pete (Ian Keith) before he took to drink.

Zeena refuses at first, but when Pete dies after drinking a bottle of wood alcohol he mistakes for moonshine (an accident that Stan has a hand in), Zeena needs a partner for her act and agrees to teach Stan the code.

Thanks to his hard-knock life, Stan also turns out to be able to draw on a deep well of pious patter ("It's what they used to give us at the orphanage on Sundays after beating us black-and-blue all week") and a gift for cold-reading—intuiting facts about someone (and the vulnerable points through which they can best be manipulated) through non-verbal cues. It's a gift that will fail him, though, at a crucial moment.

Stan is two-timing Zeena with Molly (Coleen Gray), another (younger, prettier) performer with an electric girl act, who is the girlfriend of the strongman Bruno (Mike Mazurki).

Once they have the code and their lovers have discovered their betrayal, Stan and Molly leave the carnival and head for the big city to make their fortune.

Their upscale nightclub act, in which a blindfolded Stan (as "The Great Stanton") divines the contents of the audience's written messages thanks to Molly's coded questions, is wildly successful. In the audience one night is "consulting psychologist" Lilith (Helen Walker, with tightly coiffed/repressed hair), who asks The Great Stanton a trick question.

Stan dodges the trap and impresses Lilith against her better judgment. She invites him to her office the next day:

Lilith: "How did you know [my question was fake]?"
Stan: "I didn't. I just had a feeling that your question wasn't on the level. I figured you were trying to make a chump out of me. Just common sense."
Lilith: "It's not so common."
Stan: "I don't know about that."
Lilith: "Why?"
Stan: "I've got that same feeling right now."

Stan learns that Lilith records all of her sessions with her wealthy clients, and realizes that their confessions are a gold mine. It doesn't take long for Stan to convince her to help him launch an even bigger hustle: spiritualism. With the details he gleans from Lilith's recordings Stan can convince the credulous rich that he is communing with their departed loved ones, and in return they shower him with cash. But even if Lilith's name wasn't enough to tip him off, Stan should have listened to his instincts. . .

The carnival sequences are authentically seedy, in part because a real carnival was rented and installed on the backlot.

But the final third of the movie feels a bit rushed: transitions are abrupt, Stan uncharacteristically lets down his guard at a key moment, some actions seem inadequately motivated, and some major plot developments (such as a police manhunt for Stan) are left unresolved. 

It feels a bit as if director Edmund Goulding (Dark Victory, The Razor's Edge, Pickup on South Street) was forced to shorten the movie by 30 minutes, although clearly the Production Code is playing a hand as well. In William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel, for example, rich mark Ezra Grindle (Taylor Holmes) is racked by guilt because his youthful sweetheart Dorrie died in a botched back-alley abortion, something that veteran screenwriter Jules Furthman (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep) obviously couldn't allude to. And the ending of the film, which in one of its many instances of doubling/repetition grimly echoes the beginning, still offers a faint gleam of consolation entirely missing from the novel.

But Power gives an excellent performance as Stan, a guy for whom no scam, however successful, is ever quite enough, and whose fall leads him to make a desperate choice. And Helen Walker is a chilling femme fatale. She would later appear in Call Northside 777, Impact, and The Big Combo—I'm planning a personal Helen Walker film festival right now.

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