“Mister, I was made for it.”A nasty piece of work. I love watching pretty boys use their beauty as a weapon only to go to rot. Too many modern actors seem to treat their beauty as an affliction rather than a useful blade. Lurid, revelatory, potent.
Directed by Edmund Goulding
A bleak, critically acclaimed drama.
A roustabout joins a traveling carny and schemes to figure out the mind-reading act of Mademoiselle Zeena and her alcoholic husband.
Nightmare Alley is showing in 1 cinema in Los Angeles - next screening Tuesday 20 October at 22:00 at Los Feliz 3 Theatre.
Next screenings: Tuesday 20 October.
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“Mister, I was made for it.”A nasty piece of work. I love watching pretty boys use their beauty as a weapon only to go to rot. Too many modern actors seem to treat their beauty as an affliction rather than a useful blade. Lurid, revelatory, potent.
Definitely in the running for one of the most unique noirs of its time, Nightmare Alley is a classic ‘be careful what you wish for’ story—the tale of a master manipulator and his rise to fame from Carnival Barker opportunist to high end nightclub mentalist and just what happens when you reach to high. Super dark even for a noir, and cynical to a fault while also providing incredibly interesting observations on alcoholism, psychology, and religion—this is an obscure masterpiece with an electric Tyrone Power sizzling up the screen as the selfish sociopath conman well versed in the art of exploiting others.Double crosses, carnival atmos, the gooseflesh inducing visuals of the fountain scene, tarot cards… there’s just so much to love here.Monolithic Noir in my book—an all timer.
The greatest fallibility of man is his capacity for forgiveness in Edmund Goulding’s “Nightmare Alley.” With a star turn by Tyrone Power in a role so dark that it could be a black hole, “Alley” was a flop on release for transforming Hollywood’s favorite swashbuckler into an irredeemable spiritualist con man. At least, he -should- be irredeemable. “Alley” remains fixed in the canon of essential noirs for dabbling in a different sort of grimness. Power’s scheming sociopath has no actual supernatural powers, but still seems to shimmy out of every quagmire through riding the waves of the infinite kindness of strangers. It makes Power’s slimy mentalist Sam Carlisle a different sort of protagonist in his genre; all the more surprising of a turn, since “Alley” was the rare big budget noir of its era, featuring a fully populated carnival set constructed for its filming. Carlisle didn’t earn the right to be a jaded private dick, nor is he at all a man wrongly framed for plot gone wrong. He is, himself, all the bad, in a world that is only seeking for some sort of magic and enlightenment. It’s when Carlisle encounters a fellow dark artist as played by Helen Walker; an actress searching for her own type of forgiveness, after being accused of driving drunk and killing a hitchhiking GI just one year earlier, that “Alley” truly brews a potent type of cinematic cyanide.If it can contribute a mystery to the noir genre, “Alley” forces viewers to ask where the capacity for exoneration must end.
It follows a charismatic carnival worker who partners with various women to run a lucrative mentalist con, only to spiral downward into self-destruction and greed.
Nightmare Alley was directed by Edmund Goulding in 1947, a British-born filmmaker known for his work during Hollywood's Golden Age.
Though a box-office disappointment upon its initial release, it has since achieved classic status and entered the Criterion Collection.
