William Lindsay Gresham

From what I understand Tyrone Power bought the rights to Lindsay Gresham’s novel for something like $60,000 and wanted it to be a vehicle to shed his romantic lead image and establish him as a legitimate actor. The studios at first felt the material was unfilmable but Powers and prospective director Edmund Goulding were persistent and the movie was filmed.

via FILM NIOR TRIPLE FEATURE: NIGHTMARE ALLEY, PANIC IN THE STREETS, THE BIG KNIFE |.

A Number of stills on this page.

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Here is William Lindsay Gresham’s life insurance ID card, and his copy of a particularly apt title by Ed Wood, Jr. (Kathleen Everitt was Ed’s wife’s name.) His books: Nightmare Alley and Monster Midway, fiction and nonfiction respectively.

via William Gibson.

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Below are classic works of Satanic literature. Here you’ll find Satanic heroes as well as characters that expose the foibles of the human species. Read these with care, for they are full of dark wisdom.

via Church of Satan Fiction Reading List.

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Nightmare Alley (1947) Directed by Edmund Goulding. Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Grey, Helen Walker (110 min).

Tyrone Power, his handsome hunk days behind him, plays a conniving drifter who covets a job as a carnival mentalist, wooing earthy Joan Blondell for the secrets of her racket. His scurrilous ambitions lie beyond the circus tent, and he purveys his mind reading deceptions into a fortune, after linking up with an unscrupulous Park Avenue psychologist. Helen Walker’s icy vixen, Dr. Lilith Ritter, exploits her wealthy, troubled clientele, while redefining femme fatale, in this lurid tale. Power is brilliant as the seedy hero. “Spectacularly sordid” Dave Kehr, New York Times.

Director Edmund Goulding and matinee idol Tyrone Power collaborated successfully on the film version of the best selling novel The Razor’s Edge in 1946. Somerset Maugham’s soul-searching book struck a chord with weary post-war audiences. This was Power’s first film after returning from his Marine service, and it was nominated for Oscar’s Best Picture of 1947. For both Goulding and Power, Nightmare Alley would be a thematic departure in their careers. William Lindsay Gresham’s trashy—and best selling—novel had plenty of raunch, unfilmable under the Production Code, where you could not use words like “bitch” “screw” or “douche” or mention that one character had been sexually abused by her father, and another died of a back alley abortion. Studio head Darryl Zanuck was persuaded to keep the proven team of Goulding and Power together, even though neither of them had never made a movie quite like this one.

Power read Gresham’s book, which had been well reviewed for its hard-boiled prose style, and wanted to star in the screen version. Zanuck was appalled that his golden boy wanted to play in such a downbeat film, with only Joan Blondell for any box office sparkle. Director Henry King, who had championed Power from the beginning of his screen career, was summoned to try and talk some sense into him. King said there were plenty of other serious dramatic roles he could play on the lot, and Power challenged him, “Name one.” King could not think of any (Guiles 221).

(more at the link)

via MDNightmareAlley.

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The film Nightmare Alley laid in copyright limbo for over fifty years, a struggle between the estates of producer George Jessel, author W.L. Gresham and the 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. In that time, its cult status continued to grow. Not just from the rarity of its screenings on television and at film festivals, but from the later suicides of the book’s author and the movie’s director, and its remarkably grim, bold, and disturbing look at hucksterism and its milieu.

It was 1946 and Tyrone Power, Fox’s leading male star, had returned from service in World War II. From an acting family and a stage background, he had grown tired of the empty “pretty boy” image that had made him a matinee idol. He wanted a different role. One that would showcase his range and depth and change the public’s (and industry’s) perception of him from a toothpaste ad to a serious actor. He had leaned toward that end with his first post-war duty role by playing Larry Darrell in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.

Power leveraged his past success (and the considerable money he made for the studio) to make Nightmare Alley his prestige project. Studio Head Daryl F. Zanuck was against it from the start but he owed Power gratitude and a bit of artistic license so he green-lighted the film. Ultimately, Zanuck’s instincts would prove correct (as they so often did). The film failed miserably at the box office and Power ended up returning to the adventurous, swashbuckling roles that had made him famous. Interestingly, many of 20th Century Fox’s most unique and enduring pictures were made in this vein, by a proven film artist’s passionate plea and Zanuck’s begrudging nod.

War weary audiences of the late ’40s were not ready for it. Although film noir was seeping into the mainstream, an “A” picture starring the dashing and overwhelmingly handsome Tyrone Power as a greedy, manipulative charlatan was too much for them. Adding to this shock was the story, adapted from a novel immersed in the sleazy world of carny, portraying the darker realities of alcoholism, marital infidelity, religion, spiritualism and ambition by an author who was a known communist, drunkard and wife beater.

via Fox Studio Classics – Film Noir – Nightmare Alley – Point Of View.

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Excitingly tawdry, as well as self-defeatingly slick, this backstage excursion through the showbiz lower depths was based on the doggedly poetic pulp novel by William Lindsay Gresham (perhaps the only drugstore shocker inspired by T.S. Eliot). The project was evidently initiated at Power’s request and involved a number of high-powered professionals. Howard Hawks associate Jules Furthman wrote the hard-boiled adaptation for high-gloss director Edmund Goulding; Sternberg cameraman Lee Garmes provided the opalescent cinematography. The early sequences are nearly timeless in introducing the carnival world of marks and rubes, Gypsy fortune-tellers, dimwitted strongmen, and the unseen geek—a broken-down alcoholic who bites the heads off live chickens for a daily bottle of booze and a place to sleep it off.

Nightmare Alley doesn’t begin to approach the vérité ferocity of Tod Browning’s Freaks. The dappled studio lighting and artfully cluttered midway mise-en-scène suggest a rancid Oz forever stuck in Kansas. When the movie opened in October 1947, Variety found it both grimly realistic and horrifyingly fantastic. Writing in Time, James Agee praised the cynical humor and sharp social observation, although both seem to have evaporated over the past half-century. Nightmare Alley is a grim morality tale in which gum-chewing smoothie Stanton Carlisle (Power, who appears in virtually every scene) graduates from barker to mind-reading mentalist to big-time spiritualist, while stringing along a succession of female costars—notably Joan Blondell as a warmhearted soothsayer and Colleen Gray as a winsome circus girl.

via New York Movies – Side Shows – page 1.

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William Lindsay Gresham

William Lindsay Gresham was born in Baltimore in 1909, “the descendant of a family that settled in Maryland in 1641,” according to the promotional copy on the back of the paperback edition of Nightmare Alley. He moved with his family to New York as a child, where he became fascinated by the freaks and sideshows he saw at Coney Island. It is the dark side of carnival life that continued to obsess him as an adult, and it is that world which inspired his novel, Nightmare Alley, as well as the handful of non-fiction books he wrote. Nightmare Alley belongs not to the hard-boiled world of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, but to the dark and shadowy world of noir. As a literary term, noir can be applied to any work–especially one involving crime–that is notably dark, brooding, cynical, complex, and pessimistic. Nightmare Alley is certainly all that and more, described by one critic as “a tough, relentless, colorful novel that exposes the private world of the freaks in order to comment on a sick, degrading society.” The novel depicts the rise of Stan Carlisle from a carnival mentalist to a successful “spiritualist,” preying on the rich and gullible matrons of society, to his eventual fall and total disintegration. The book sold fairly well, and was made into a striking and memorable film starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell.

Gresham’s depressed vision of society colored his private life as well; he was an alcoholic and an abusive husband to his wife Joy Davidman, as well as to their children. Joy eventually fled to England with their children, where she conducted a long-term love affair with the author C. S. Lewis, whom she eventually married (their story was recently told in the 1993 film Shadowlands). In 1962 Gresham committed suicide in a run-down hotel room in New York, where he had registered under the name “Asa Kimball, of Baltimore.” The only tribute paid to him in the New York Times came from the bridge columnist.

via .

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Allistair Crowley Magick In Theory and Practice

Crowley, Allistair. Magick In Theory and Practice. Paris, 1929. Subscriber’s limited edition. Cloth bound. Damp staining to rear cover, former owners notations and ex-libris inside front cover, otherwise good condition. Signed and inscribed to William Lindsay Gresham by James “The Amazing” Randi: “To Bill Gresham- I’ve tried the routines in this book – and found the instructions confusing – if you can make them work – YOU’RE SICK! Randi July 1959.” William Lindsay Gresham authored Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls, Limbo Tower, Monster Midway and Nightmare Alley.

via Allistair Crowley Magick In Theory and Practice.

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Ray Garton’s Bloodshot Eye Movie Reviews: Nightmare Alley.

Nightmare Alley Review
by Ray Garton

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.

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Douglas Gresham (born November 10, 1945) is a British biographer and film producer, resident in Ireland, and one of the two heirs to the literary work of C. S. Lewis, including the Narnia series.

via Douglas Gresham – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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