Blu-ray Review: Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley on the Criterion Collection

This extraordinary, once rare, horror noir has been outfitted with a transfer that honors its beautiful, nearly blasphemous power.

Nightmare AlleyEdmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley viscerally understands the lurid appeal of carnivals and acts of illusion. Magic shows and other exhibition acts involve various forms of trickery, and people are often eager to spot the precise fissure between reality and fakery. Carnivals are often mythologized as places of private debauchery, as they may be at the surface of an exploitive underworld that profits from satiating our submerged desires. In the film’s opening scenes, Goulding and cinematographer Lee Garmes effortlessly conjure such associations, contrasting attractive and charismatic performers, such as Zeena (Joan Blondell) and Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power), with the exploitive bosses and virtual slaves who drive the behind-the-scenes machinery of the shows. One series of images is particularly potent and portentous: Underneath Zeena’s stage is her drunk lover, Pete (Ian Keith), who struggles to feed her answers for her telepathy act from a hidden room where he also holes up to drink, encaged by his addiction.

Nightmare Alley’s first act abounds in such rooms, as well as alleyways, trap doors, trunks, and curtains, and images with multiple planes that suggest warring motivations, desires, and truths and lies. The film’s title is virtually literalized by the setting, which is eventually offered up as a synecdoche of capitalist America and the dueling spells of potential success and doom that it posits. Yet the title also has a psychological dimension, suggesting the moral peril of giving in to the desires that capitalism so easily monetizes. Stan is a hustler eager to transcend the carnival gig and make it in respectable show business, as Zeena and Pete once did before the booze got the best of him and her dependency on him got the best of her. And, as the film’s opening scenes establish, Stan is an astonishing con man on and off the stage. He “works” Zeena and a beautiful young woman, Molly (Coleen Gray), as casually as he manipulates each night’s audience as first an assistant and then a co-star of Zeena’s show. Quite quickly, Stan masters Zeena and Pete’s “code,” involving affected speech that allows performers to feign telepathy, and with his shrewdness and daring he becomes the hit of metropolitan society.

With its tale of a performer, or hustler, who captures society’s imagination, emboldened by his own shamelessness, Nightmare Alley brings to mind Elia Kazan’s later A Face in the Crowd. There are also hints, given the internal rot of the attractive and ambitious man at the film’s center, of Albert Lewin’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. But Nightmare Alley goes further than either of those films, suggesting just how insidiously deep and wide-ranging the notion of performance, which is so intimately related to con artistry, runs through all strata of society. As Stan’s act grows hotter and hotter, he’s noticed by a psychologist, Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), who immediately sees through him. She’s quite a bit more ruthless than Stan, immediately processing people as steps on her self-actualizing ladder, as the film daringly links the catharses of therapy, with its ritualized talk, with shows like Stan’s. And as Stan begins to fashion himself as a spiritualist, a connection is established not only between the contrivances of psychology and show business, but between all of the above and religion.

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Show business, especially of the magic variety, psychology, and religion are all pitilessly portrayed here as elaborate appeasements of our fears, which spring from our vanity. Much of Stan’s shtick involves seducing the audience, encouraging them to believe in their specialness, thusly rendering them gullible to whatever he wishes to say or do. Lilith operates in a similar fashion, while covertly recording her high-society clients’ secrets and selling them to Stan for the mystic show. This implicit link between sacred elements of society, all essentially show business, with the underworld of carny exploitation is mercilessly logical, though the carnival, with its sympathetically drawn performers, at least admits freely to its aim to bedazzle.

Jules Furthman’s screenplay, adapted from William Lindsay Gresham’s controversial novel, never dilutes the sacrilegious power of these associations with preaching. The viewer is allowed to discern this latticework of corruption and delusion for ourselves, which is often dramatized via starkly intimate close-ups and heated conversations that are largely unpunctuated by the sort of lush score that’s common of American films of the period. Goulding adeptly employs silence here, conjuring an existential dread that can, and has, been interpreted as a response to the sort of postwar anxieties that often drive film noir.

The need to, say, believe in an afterlife or God, or that some defect in our personality can be unlocked by a talking cure, is addictive. So is selling delusion, hooking “marks” on the power of one’s persuasiveness. And so, the film’s arc is anticipated early on by Pete’s crippling alcoholism. This performer made the mistake of savoring the narcotic rush of fooling people and feeling infallible—a mistake that Stan is destined to make. Stan’s fall is foreshadowed heavily in Nightmare Alley, especially in the opening carnival scenes, which are rich in doom-laden symbolism and noir shadows. Zeena, another performer who gets high on the rush of her profession, truly believes in fortune-telling, and she warns Stan of the “hanged man,” though Pete and the carnival geek are more practical harbingers of doom.

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Ultimately, though, Nightmare Alley is so disturbing for not entirely ruling out the existence of a mystical realm, as Stan’s comeuppance feels as if it may have a supernatural element. There’s a suggestion in Goulding’s film that, for all the characters’ cynicism, God may in fact be punishing Stan, and for all his braggadocio, he believes in such possibilities himself. Consequentially, Nightmare Alley doesn’t entirely judge people for being so suggestible. There’s an intrinsic human need for a little bullshit to grease the stressed wheels of our lives, and that need, properly harnessed, can give charlatans profound power.

Image/Sound

This new 4K image occasionally looks soft and waxy, particularly in close-ups of faces, which could be inevitable given D.P. Lee Garmes’s sensual, ephemeral lighting. Given the confident pristineness of Nightmare Alley’s more conventionally “noir-esque” visuals, such as the blacks of the sharp, cage-like shadows that are frequently in the frames, one is inclined to give the transfer the benefit of the doubt, and the multiple planes of the images, especially in the carnival scenes, really pop. Besides, the softness is often aesthetically appealing, contributing to the film’s hypnotic aura. The English LPCM 1.0 soundtrack is quite nuanced, ably presenting the many subtle little noises that accentuate this often creepily quiet production, while lending the carnival showstoppers necessary, and highly varied, bombast.

Extras

The supplements here offer a full and compelling story of Nightmare Alley’s creation, as well as its place in film noir and American cinema in general. The best one-stop-shop is the 32-minute interview with critic Imogen Sara Smith, in which she outlines how Tyrone Power initiated the project, an adaptation of the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, in a bid to stretch out of the romantic spectacles that had made him a legend. Smith discusses Fox head Daryl F. Zanuck’s resistance to the film, as he feared its luridness would ruin his biggest star, and how the novel and film’s obsessions with addictions and delusions reflected the struggles of Gresham and director Edmund Goulding, who was known for melodramas like Dark Victory. Smith is also quite perceptive regarding the film’s visual style and acting, particularly Power’s complex and daring turn and Helen Walker’s ferocious performance as a vicious shrink. Most of this information is also covered, less colorfully, by film historians James Ursini and Alain Silver in a 2005 commentary that has been ported over from the Fox DVD.

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The next best piece is an interview with performer and sideshow historian Todd Robbins, who offers a history of the rise and fall of carnivals and freak shows that inspired Nightmare Alley. Robbins unsparingly covers the cruelty of this business, while claiming that the myths of this life tend to overshadow the potential kindness and loyalty of many bosses and their employees. Meanwhile, actor Coleen Gray discusses in a short interview from 2007 how a series of screen tests landed her both Kiss of Death and Nightmare Alley, while a 1971 audio interview with director Henry King includes anecdotes concerning Power’s rise to fame. Also notable is a leaflet featuring an essay by critic-screenwriter Kim Morgan (who co-wrote the upcoming Guillermo del Toro remake of Nightmare Alley), which offers more context on Gresham. The theatrical trailer and six tarot cards round out a lively and eccentric package.

Overall

This extraordinary, once rare, horror noir has been outfitted with a transfer that honors its beautiful, nearly blasphemous power, with illuminating extras to boot.

Score: 
 Cast: Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, Taylor Holmes, Mike Mazurki, Ian Keith  Director: Edmund Goulding  Screenwriter: Jules Furthman  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 111 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1947  Release Date: May 25, 2021  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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