Nightmare Alley (Fox 1947, Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell)

Powerful and unusual melodrama Nightmare Alley marked a radical change of direction for its star, Tyrone Power who was taking a calculated risk playing a totally unsympathetic character. It was a move that was to win him critical plaudits and he regarded his performance as the best of his career but Power’s fans were unable to accept him as the unscrupulous anti-hero.

Power plays an opportunistic sideshow barker in a seedy carnival who steals the secret code used in their mind-reading act by JOAN BLONDELL and IAN KEITH, unintentionally causing the latter’s death. He and his wife, COLEEN GRAY, leave the carnival where, after a period in nightclubs as “The Great Stanton, Mentalist”, he teams up with bogus psychologist HELEN WALKER to fleece wealthy clients. He forces his wife to become part of the act but, during a bout of fake spiritualism, she inadvertently reveals him as a fake. Making his escape, Power becomes an alcoholic and ends up first as a hobo and then as a carnival freak who, for a bottle of liquor a day and a place to sleep, bites the heads off live chickens as a side-show attraction…

Impressive support came from Blondell, Gray, Walker, Keith and MIKE MAZURKI as the carnival strong man, and there was a memorably etched performance from TAYLOR HOLMES as an aged industrialist who believes that Power will be able to help him communicate with his dead sweetheart and gives him $150,000 to build a tabernacle.

Edmund Goulding’s careful and atmospheric direction, the effective screen adaptation of Gresham’s novel by Jules Furthman, Lee Garmes’ expressionistic low-key monochrome cinematography and Cyril Mockridge’s eerie and apposite score, allied to Power’s central performance, gave Nightmare Alley a considerable power which still impresses even in these liberated times of overt screen gore and horror.

(The circus featured in the film, incidentally, was the Patterson-Yankee carnival, which was rented by the studio and rebuilt on ten acres of the Twentieth Century-Fox back-lot).

production details
Country: USA | Twentieth Century Fox | 112 minutes
Release Year: 1947

Writer: Jules Furthman
Based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham
Music: Cyril Mockridge
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Producer: George Jessel
Director: Edmund Goulding

cast
Tyrone Power as Stanton ‘Stan’ Carlisle
Helen Walker as Lilith Ritter
Joan Blondell as Zeena Krumbein
Coleen Gray as Molly
Mike Mazurki as Bruno
Taylor Holmes as Ezra Grindle
Ian Keith as Pete Krumbein
Roy Roberts as McGraw – Final Carnival Owner (uncredited)