This snakebite of a movie is one of the best and most original film noirs. There’s little else like it, even today. Tyrone Power’s Stan Carlisle isn’t all bad, but rarely does a lead character in a classic Hollywood movie repel us as much as he does here. This also contains some of the ugliest, scariest, and saddest depictions of alcoholism in 1940s films (more corrosive than The Lost Weekend even).
We spend the first forty-five minutes not knowing whether we actually like Tyrone Power or not. (This film plays particularly well if you’re familar with Power’s previous romantic leading man roles, to which this offers a brutal contrast.) In his great performance here, he rubs us the wrong way from the start and then our feelings toward him see-saw as he either charms us or stumbles into our sympathy only to show some flash of arrogance or calculated selfishness just moments after. He starts out as a gopher in a grimy carnival for Joan Blondell’s mentalist act, but soon learns the tricks to become a skilled mentalist in his own right. After falling out with the carnys, Power gets his act into glistening nightclubs where he becomes famous entertaining the martini-sipping upper crust. That’s not good enough for him though, and he starts using his skills for criminal con jobs with the help of a crooked psychiatrist (Helen Walker, who’s hot when she’s angry).
See this at least twice. The foreshadowing at the beginning of how everything’s going to turn out is intricate and stinging, and best appreciated on subsequent viewings.
Nightmare Alley spent decades unavailable on home video because of unresolved legal issues behind the scenes. It never even came out on VHS. In that time, the film acquired a reputation as one of the great, underseen noirs. When the DVD finally happened in 2005, the film lived up to the hype.