“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.
Geregisseerd door Edmund Goulding
Een somber, door critici geprezen drama.
Zwerver Stanton raakt gefascineerd door het circusleven en in het bijzonder door een alcoholistische gedachtenlezer. Deze leert hem hoe makkelijk het is om mensen op te lichten en wanneer de man sterft neemt de zwerver de rol van gedachtenlezer over.
Nightmare Alley draait in 1 bioscoop in Los Angeles - eerstvolgende voorstelling dinsdag 20 oktober om 22:00 in Los Feliz 3 Theatre.
Volgende voorstellingen: dinsdag 20 oktober.
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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.
Het volgt een charmante kermisbediende die samenwerkt met verschillende vrouwen om een winstgevende mentalistenzwendel op te zetten, wat leidt tot een neerwaartse spiraal van zelfvernietiging en hebzucht.
Nightmare Alley werd in 1947 geregisseerd door Edmund Goulding, een in Groot-Brittannië geboren filmmaker die bekend staat om zijn werk tijdens de Gouden Eeuw van Hollywood.
Hoewel het bij de oorspronkelijke release een teleurstelling was aan de kassa, heeft de film sindsdien een klassieke status bereikt en is hij opgenomen in de Criterion Collection.
