***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker
screenplay by Jules Furthman, based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham
directed by Edmund Goulding
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The great thing about Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley is its refusal to show you The Way. Its noir-sap hero is all about The Way, you see (in his case, an amalgam of grifting and a genuine psychic ability), but when he places his total faith in it, he inevitably loses everything. Of course, he's not the only sap looking for an absolute answer: his victims are all too willing to ditch intellectual self-defense in favour of a god/shaman/big know-it-all to relieve them of the burden of making their own choices. The film is smart enough to lay waste to not just the traditional target of spiritualists, but also the modern voodoo science of psychology–both in their own way valid, but with powers blown so far out of proportion that they become vivid media for drawing the long con.
Of course, Nightmare Alley is famous for reasons that have nothing to do with this approach, chief amongst them an utterly cynical rendering of the carnival milieu. Hero Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) is a carny barker whose ambitions lead him to first wrest the secret code of a mentalist act from old hand Zeena (Joan Blondell), then blow her over for younger model Molly (Coleen Gray). The spectre of the geek, the hopeless drunk who commits unspeakable acts for a bottle a day, hangs over the proceedings, but because Stanton has a one-way ticket out of obscurity, he's not going to worry about such niceties. He's as utterly naked in his greed as the carnival gallery is beautifully (and pathetically) drawn.
But the film smashes into your gut for reasons that have nothing to do with narrative or background noise, for Stanton actually does have a modicum of psychic ability, and his schizophrenic mix of sucker show with the real McCoy has disquieting things to say about the space between the genuine article and creative spin. Even more disturbing is the presence of a psychologist (Helen Walker) who's supposed to be a beacon of reason but is instead spinning her own kernel of truth into impossibly magical powers. Stanton may know the way around psychic ability, but he's out of his league with this woman, capable as she is of getting his intellectual trust with her respectable sorcery–creating a con so massive it's beyond obscene.
This being a noir, the whole thing comes undone; the hero who had all the angles covered winds up degraded worse than he started. This isn't noir as mood and comforting cosmic justice, though–it's the genre as a program, used to illustrate the dangers of semiotic drift long before the term was ever coined. And it's a tool to intellectual self-defense, to never assume that apparent authorities have non-stop answers that relieve you of the responsibility of deciding for yourself. As event after horrible event shoves our hero beyond redemption (one studio-dictated grace note excepted), we are shown the dangers of believing in absolutes. For once, noir's cynicism is founded in something other than a current in the postwar zeitgeist. Nightmare Alley is a damn near unmissable film.
Fox's full-frame DVD presentation of Nightmare Alley is reasonably sharp, with the many levels of black and deep grey in this unusually dark film (even for a noir) impeccably rendered. The Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo remix is almost as good, perhaps a shade tinnier than is desirable but nonetheless dynamic. As for extras, James Ursini and Alain Silver contribute another commentary to a Fox Film noir title, this one exceptionally good: they're alive to the spiritual elements of the script as they recount the sad tale of source writer William Lindsay Gresham and Tyrone Power's attempts to break his shallow, heroic image. It's a thorough yakker not at all trivial in its concerns. The film's trailer plus trailers for The Dark Corner, Laura, The Street with No Name, Panic in the Streets, and House of Bamboo complete the platter.
111 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Stereo), English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC: English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox
