Ray Garton's Bloodshot Eye Movie Reviews: Batman Begins

Nightmare Alley - 1947
Directed by: Edmund Goulding
Written by: Jules Furthman
(based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham)

Starring:
Tyrone Power - Stanton Carlisle
Coleen Gray - Molly Carlisle
Joan Blondell - Zeena Krumbein
Ian Keith - Pete Krumbein
Helen Walker - Lilith Ritter

While Nightmare Alley is definitely a film noir - not only that, but one of the most grim and bleak ever made, maybe the most - it has a stripe of the supernatural down its back that make its edges bleed into the genre of horror. It’s the darkest film noir I’ve ever seen, both thematically and in its lighting.

Nightmare Alley is set in the world of the carnival. Novelist William Lindsay Gresham got a hotel room at Coney Island, where he spent a lot of time getting to know the carnival world and the people in it (he later returned to that same hotel room to take his own life, so I’m guessing Gresham knew something about grim and bleak). It pulls back the canvas and takes a look at some of the tricks and secrets of the carnies, and for that reason alone, it’s a fascinating movie. But it provides much more than that.

Nightmare Alley has an interesting story behind it. Tyrone Power was Hollywood’s number one pretty boy for a long time, and when he came back from WWII, he wanted to change that image. He was tired of the romantic leads, and wanted a chance to draw from his extensive stage experience. He wanted something more serious and meaty, something darker than the material he’d been getting. His first attempt to change his image was 1946's The Razor’s Edge (also directed by Goulding, who’d been directing since the silent days and was always attached to quality A-list movies). Then he found a property that really appealed to him - Nightmare Alley. It had been a bestselling novel, Gresham’s only successful book, and 20th Century Fox had bought the rights for something like $65,000, a nice sum in those days. Power wanted to do it. He fought tooth and nail for the role of Stanton Carlisle. Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck did not want Power attached to that movie. Zanuck didn’t like the property at all. Power’s career had already peaked, but he was still a star, and Zanuck feared that Nightmare Alley would turn off Power’s female fan base. But Power fought for it, and he eventually won the role. Zanuck still didn’t like the property, though, and when it was finished, he didn’t like the movie. It’s an A-list movie all the way, but Zanuck released it as a second-feature B-movie and let it run for only a short time before pulling it out of circulation. The movie was a flop simply because it didn’t have a chance to catch on with anybody. Zanuck buried it. Chances are good it wouldn’t have done good business, anyway - it was darker than anything else out there in ‘47, about as bleak as a movie can get. It was ahead of its time in that way, and it very well might have turned off audiences had it been given a longer run.

Years later, Nightmare Alley would make some rare appearances on TV, but it was never rereleased in theaters. Those who managed to see it loved it, and to collectors of film noir, it became the Holy Grail. It was never released on VHS or laser disc. It languished in obscurity for almost sixty years as legal rangling went on between Fox and the movie’s producer, comedian Georgie Jessel. It’s recently been released on DVD. Now you can pick it up at Amazon for a little over ten bucks - and I strongly recommend that you do.

Tyrone Power, known for his dark good looks, showed some serious acting chops in Nightmare Alley. He came from a very famous acting family who worked primarily on the stage. Here, he plays Stanton Carlisle, the new guy at the carnival. He’s having an affair with Zeena (the great Joan Blondell), the carnival’s fortune teller and mentalist. Zeena’s husband, a broken-down alcoholic mentalist, now helps Zeena with her act and begs for booze. One night, Carlisle takes pity on Pete and hands him a bottle. He thinks the bottle contains booze, but it contains wood alcohol, and Pete, who doesn’t care how it tastes, drinks the whole thing and dies. Carlisle is overwhelmed by guilt over this, especially when he profits from Pete’s death by becoming Zeena’s right-hand man in her act. Zeena and Pete had developed a two-person code - Zeena went out into the audience, and a blindfolded Pete would reveal things about them that he couldn’t possibly know, because Zeena relayed information to him in this special spoken code. The code is worth a mint, and Zeena says it’s their nest egg. But they have no need for that now that Pete’s gone, and she teaches the code to Carlisle.

With that code, Carlisle runs off with Molly, who also knows the code, and together they become a nightclub sensation.

Carnies are very superstitious people, but Carlisle doesn’t buy into any of that. He doesn’t even believe that he has a touch of second sight, even though he sometimes knows things about people that go beyond the trickery, things he couldn’t possibly know.

Nightmare Alley is a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, but darker than any you’ve seen before.

The word "geek" has come to mean, today, a nerd. Whether it’s a Star Wars fan or a computer nerd, the word "geek" has become attached to these guys with taped glasses and pocket protectors who live in their parents’ basements. But that’s a rather recent development. In the carnival and circus worlds, the geek was a guy who bit the heads off live chickens. He was usually an alcoholic who worked for food and booze. It was the lowest position in the carnival world and the geek was treated like an animal, or at best, like some kind of primitive man-thing. The geek was someone who forfeited his dignity and his soul for a guaranteed bottle of booze a day, and a lot of raw and bloody chicken meat between his teeth.

When Carlisle comes to the carnival, he is appalled by the geek. At one point, the geek goes crazy because he hasn’t been given his bottle that day. The geek makes a horrible, nightmarish sound, a sound that is something less than human. That sound returns occasionally on the soundtrack. Carlisle observes, "How can a man get so low?"

As you might have noticed, I’ve focused more on the movie’s background in this review than on the movies itself. That’s because when I saw it, I knew very little about it - that’s the best way to see a movie, and I want you to have that experience, too, so I’ve revealed very little about the story.

Nightmare Alley is a brooding film, filled with dark shadows and raw greed. It goes beyond its carnival setting to explore both spirituality and spiritualism. It pushed the ratings code to its limit and inspired a studio mogul to do everything short of burning every copy to get rid of it. It’s a rich, haunting film, and the frightening cries of the geek will stay with you long after THE END appears on the screen.

[Out of a possible four Bloodshot Eyeballs.]

Nightmare Alley

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