Nightmare Alley (1947)

Is there anything better than seeing a great movie for the first time? (Aside from all the usual landmarks of one's personal life, of course.) The Siren was prepared to like Nightmare Alley, the 1947 noir set in the world of carnivals and con artists, but instead she loved it. She saw the film after a long week, punctuated by the baby's epic cold and sleep deprivation that turned the household into the garden party scene from The Manchurian Candidate. Given the Siren's low frame of mind Nightmare Alley should have depressed the living hell out of her. Instead she switched off the DVD player and immediately started proselytizing to Mr. C: "You HAVE to see this one!"

The Siren has spent some time on her blog discussing films that are often called noir, but really aren't, like Macao and Moonrise. No such uncertainty here. Nightmare Alley is noir, all right. But it has some aspects that set it apart, chiefly the budget. Most crime thrillers of the era had middling to dead-broke production values. This movie was the pet project of its star, Tyrone Power, who bought the rights to William Gresham's novel and then browbeat Darryl Zanuck and 20th-Century Fox into greenlighting the project. The crew was strictly A-list and the whole thing was put together with great care and ample money.

Certainly this movie stands out in the career of director Edmund Goulding. There are tragic moments in his prior movies--John Barrymore's pathetic death in Grand Hotel, Bette Davis feeling the sun on her hands for the last time in Dark Victory. But in other Goulding movies, people suffer in refined settings, and they do it in good taste. Hiring Goulding to direct Nightmare Alley was a bit like assigning James Ivory to adapt Last Exit to Brooklyn. How wonderful, then, that Goulding rose to the occasion.

While some contemporary critics (including the ever-prescient James Agee) were impressed by Nightmare Alley, others were repelled. (Check out this piece from the New York Times, where the anonymous critic takes out his tweezers and examines the film like a tick he just pulled off the family dog.) Despite the film's brilliance it isn't hard to understand the shock. Imagine you fell in love with Tyrone Power as he squired Sonja Henie around the ski resort or swept Maureen O'Hara into his chiseled pirate arms. There was nothing to prepare you for the sight of the most beautiful man in movies conning little old ladies and meeting a fate as dark as anything in American cinema.

Audiences sidestepped Nightmare Alley like a dead squirrel in the driveway. The movie had a short release. Zanuck yanked it out of theaters and stuck a sword back in Power's hand for Captain from Castile. Litigation between the producer and the company then kept it out of view for decades. Nightmare Alley achieved legendary status via long unavailability. Occasionally a private print would be screened, ensuring that word-of-mouth kept the memory alive for film lovers who weren't lucky enough to have seen it. Only in 2005 did Fox finally wrap up the red tape and release the movie on DVD.

(More on Nightmare Alley to come presently. Next: Tyrone Power.)