List of Best Noir Films: #8 Nightmare Alley

 #8. Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947)
Once described as the greatest noir movie not made by arch cynic Billy Wilder, Tyrone Power gives his finest performance as the fairground hustler who works his way into society by fair means and foul, including murder. But Power’s fall is every bit as precipitous as his rise as he ends up back in the fairground as the carnival geek in this unforgettable and disturbing movie. #1 of the list is Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder. Source: www.independent.co.uk

The film's ending is not an egregious betrayal of the novel. In Gresham's last scene, Stan is forced to sell himself with a childlike politeness we haven't seen before, and is offered the geek job at the carny. In the film Stan's face is distorted by alcoholism, his eyes ringed and droopy, the pupils swimming in soup. The film's coda, in which he goes on a rampage and discovers that Molly has been hired on to the same carnival and is going to save him, is happy only to the degree that we believe he can take a cure for drink and safely hide out from the industrialist he bamboozled. Gresham paints the opening scene in the novel: “The ‘marks’ surged in—It was like a kaleidoscope—the design always changing, the particles always the same.”

The script improves on the novel in one aspect, enhancing the role of shifty psychologist Lilith (played by an ominously still and half-smiling Helen Walker) as a skeptical member of Stan's nightclub audience, rather than the shrink he sees to cure his dreams of running down a nightmare alley. On the other hand, the filmmakers could not resist adding an up-to-date technological wrinkle - a home device for recording transcription discs, which Lilith uses to blackmail Stan. The fascination of "Nightmare Alley" does not reside in logic but in qualities beyond the powers of a novelist: the expressive chiaroscuro of the lighting - even Lilith's office is a model of German expressionism, with inexplicable bar-like shadows turning the walls into a cage - and Power's vanity-free dissection of Stan in the final scenes. This picture turns conventional Hollywood starlight upside down and inside out. If he hadn't died so young, Power might have had the chance to tell Zanuck, "I told you so."  Source: www.nysun.com

Daryl Zanuck instructed screenwriter Jules Furthman to create a new ending for Nightmare Alley, believing the original version would be too cynical for audiences to take. As a result, instead of having Stan end up alone and destined to work as a carnival geek for the rest of his life or even looking for an early death (as Gersham had originally written), Furthman concluded his screenplay on a redemptive note, with Molly holding Stan in her arms, reassuring him of her love and his future.

For the role of the unscrupulous society psychoanalyst Dr. Lilith Ritter, a character Gersham created while undergoing psychotherapy, Zanuck considered casting Luise Rainer or Constance Bennett, before ultimately deciding on the much younger Helen Walker. Nightmare Alley was also a big departure for the 27-year-old actress, who had earned a solid reputation as a commediene since making her film debut in Frank Tuttle's Lucky Jordan (1942), but she found Lilith to be just the kind of "grown-up" role that she had longed for earlier in her career. Lilith uses psychoanalytic tricks of the trade to manipulate Carlisle, preying on his lack of confidence and issues about his mother abandoning him as a child.

In Time magazine (November 24, 1947), film critic James Agee wrote: Nightmare Alley is a harsh, brutal story [based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham] told with the sharp clarity of an etching. Most vivid of these is Joan Blondell as the girl he works for the secrets of the mind-reading act. Coleen Gray is sympathetic and convincing as his steadfast partner in his act and Helen Walker comes through successfully as the calculating femme who topples Power from the heights of fortune back to degradation as the geek in the carney. The lady psychiatrist that Walker plays is as cold-blooded as Stanton, and has one advantage: No inner geek. No weakness. 

In a potent scene late in the film, the rug gets pulled out from under Stan, to the point that he begins questioning his own sanity, unsure of what's been real and what's been a con, not knowing if he's losing his mind or being brilliantly played. Goulding, ingeniously, allows the audience to wonder as well. Walker plays this scene with a hint of menace, an undercurrent of knowing manipulation, wrapped up in sincerity and bursts of seemingly genuine confusion. As the psychiatrist winds around her patient in the dark, the shadows making a cruel mask of her face, the audience is left to wonder what's truth and what's lies — to think back on what had already happened and wonder if there had been an elaborate long con running, and if so where the deceit had begun, how far back the web of lies stretched. The uncertainty places the viewer into Stan's position, concocting paranoid conspiracy theories, lost in the dark, feeling betrayed. Despite its initial box office flop, Nightmare Alley is now regarded as "one of the gems of film noir," according to Stephanie Zacharek in Turner Classic Movies (December 2, 2015.) Source: www.loa.org