New York Movies – Side Shows – page 1
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.