Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley (1947)

 When I was a kid in the fifties a traveling carnival would come to a vacant lot not far from my home in Hudson, N.Y. and my parents told me to stay away.  Anything my parents told me to stay away from I was, of course, attracted to.  So I would sneak away to the carnival when I could and spend my money that I earned from my paper route on cotton candy, dangerous rides and games I knew I could never win.  I was attracted to the whole sleazy atmosphere and fantasized about running away with the carnival to escape my boring life (but ending up "running away" to a New England prep school instead).  Nightmare Alley, based on William Lindsay Gresham's bleak autobiographical novel, beautifully captures the carny life.

I do not agree with those who call this movie a film noir -- it is not fatalistic enough -- instead it is part of a subgenre called carnival noir, a subgenre recently surveyed in Brent Calderwood's article in issue 33 of Noir City, "Step Right Up: The World of Carnival Noir."  The film has an intense screenplay by Jules Furthman and shadowy cinematography by Lee Garmes, both of whose careers date back to 1919 and both of whom worked with director Josef von Sternberg on Shanghai Express in 1932.  Director Edmund Goulding was apparently brought in to direct by star Tyrone Power after working with him on the interesting film version of Somerset Maughm's The Razor's Edge the previous year.  Goulding's direction is workmanlike but lacks the expressionism of a true film noir. Goulding started out as a stage director in England and was known for his directing of actors in his melodramas and soap operas (Dark Victory, 1939).  In Nightmare Alley he directs Tyrone Power effectively in an uncharacteristic role as Stanton Carlisle, a skillful con man and mind reader who eventually destroys himself and his wife (played by Coleen Gray) with grandiosity and greed, against the advice of his Tarot-reading carny partner Zeena Crumbein (a marvelous blowsy Joan Blondell).  Furthman's screenplay is structured almost like a book, with blackouts after each chapter of Carlisle's life, as Garmes's cinematography captures the claustrophobic life of Carlisle and his partner in crime, psychiatrist Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), whose betrayal helps to turn Carlisle into an alcoholic who returns to the carnival as a "geek," biting heads off live chickens.