Nightmare Alley

1947's NIGHTMARE ALLEY is both a unique and contrived piece of entertainment that has impressed filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Edgar Wright for decades.  And Guillermo del Toro, who remade the film last year.  Its milieu of a low rent traveling carnival goes far to give the movie an eccentric reputation, though screenwriter Jules Furthman, adapting William Lindsay Gresham's novel, telegraphs more than one plot development, relying on "Chekov's gun" - a literary device that sees to it that no detail, no matter its size, be introduced unless it will somehow be relevant to the plot at some point in the story.  To me, this is a potentially limiting and gimmicky dramatic construct for people who always have this compulsion to "connect the dots" or logic out a movie.

Ambiguity might've served this adaptation far better.  NIGHTMARE ALLEY's story follows a charlatan named Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) who works with Zeena (Joan Blondell) and Pete (Ian Keith), a husband and wife team who in much better days played vaudeville with their mentalist act.  Pete hit the bottle and now they are reduced to a watered down version of their show in said carnival.  Stan learns that the couple had a special code between them that made it appear as if Zeena could read minds - one that he (and many before him) tries to get out of her.  Unsuccessfully, until one night when Pete accidentally drinks wood alcohol rather than moonshine, after Stan accidentally gave him the wrong bottle.

Stan and Zeena continue the show but he's got his eye on Molly (Coleen Gray), who also works at the carnival.   When their secret courtship is discovered, Zeena and the other carnies abruptly bully them into marriage -  in what I consider an odd and clumsy scene.  This will be an opportunity for a new partnership, and for awhile Stan and Molly recreate the golden charade, now in upscale nightclubs.  But Stan remains troubled by his (inadvertent?) role in Pete's death, and seeks the counsel of psychologist Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker).  She knows a con man when she sees one, and Stan will discover he's made perhaps an irreversible mistake with this new relationship.

Had NIGHTMARE ALLEY remained in the sleazy confines of the sideshows, it might've been a bona fide original.  Restricting the action in such a way may have birthed dramatic innovation, or perhaps director Edmund Goulding  and Furthman may have likewise just played chapter and verse from the Screenwriter's Playbook.  As it is, the story has some fascinating twists, but you can see most of them a mile away.  If you haven't viewed too many movies, you might be more surprised by the film's "full circle" closing.  I found it contrived, and while I did appreciate that the final scene was upbeat, it felt tacked on and unbelievable.

Along the way, Goulding fashions a vivid, well crafted noir that is a near continuously intriguing consideration of, among many other things:  redemption, hucksterism, spirituality, greed, karma, ersatz psychology, ambition, faith, and alcoholism.  The film was controversial in its day and the themes are handled straight on, with only the occasional intrusions of Cyril J. Mockridge's manipulative score to undermine it. 

Power, who was seeking to change his image, is smoothly excellent as a perhaps unrepentant conniver and sometime opportunist who eventually finds his soul, but is it too late?