My friend Tim Maddison and film poster expert from our new sponsor The Movie Poster Art Gallery has written a superb post on the lost noir classic ‘Nightmare Alley‘

Over to Tim:

In 1947, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, with hit after hit in swashbuckling, romantic and period roles, lobbied successfully to star in a film set in the absolute underbelly of the American entertainment business. His character would be devious, cynical, scheming, and doomed to a hideous comeuppance. After it was made, this film would then be lost for decades – trapped in a legal dispute and assuming legendary status – until at last it crept into the light and. onto our screens again. in 2005, to deserved acclaim. That star was Tyrone Power. The film was ‘Nightmare Alley‘.

The war years had seen dark themes, and even darker cinematography, permeate a notable section of Hollywood’s output: what is now universally (and with good reason) tagged film noir. Cinema audiences were being cut loose from old certainties and Hollywood was changing fast to satisfy a taste for stronger fare – but in 1947, even after Fred MacMurray’s against-type success in ‘Double Indemnity‘ (1944), it was a startling move for an actor of Power’s persona and standing to undertake such a role. But Power was passionate to seize a part that might at last secure him a place as a truly serious screen actor. It was only his persistence that got 20th Fox’s reluctant production head, Darryl F. Zanuck, to green light the project.

Set in the world of the travelling carnival, ‘Nightmare Alley’ is an enthralling and, at times, genuinely disturbing look into a hidden world that is parallel to, but utterly distinct from, the ‘straight’ world of those who come to enjoy the tricksy, magical and illicit delights it purveys.

If Power, who is superb throughout, was on the surface the most unlikely potential star for such fare – over which hangs a penumbra of bad alcohol, tarot cards and ill fate – mainstream director Edmund Goulding seemed equally unsuited to the material. However, like the carnival, Goulding’s life away from work was a secret one: a hedonistic sideshow of drugs, booze, bisexual couplings and out-and-out orgies. Here, in fact, was a director who truly understood what lay behind the outer show of things, the carefully staged production and the danger of being revealed.

As the juggernaut of ‘Avatar’, CGI and 3-D currently shakes the ground, it’s timely to be reminded of the captivating magic that Hollywood’s studio craftsmen (men and women who would shrug diffidently at the label of ‘art’) created out of mere black and white. Goulding may have been pretty camera-blind, but cinematographer Lee Garmes conjured one of the most radical chiaroscuro looks to any film of the era, creating a visual scheme in which faces are half-hidden by slashes of darkness and the appearance of the ‘geek’ is all the more alarming for being only half-seen in the background.

The clip above shows Garmes’s lighting at it’s most dramatic and spellbinding as Power’s character, scheming to extract the secrets of the mentalist act from the former headlining husband and wife team, is unwittingly bewitched.

The film was not a box office success and a noirish fate awaited some of its creators in real life. Zanuck was too dubious of the material to promote it properly and Tyrone Power’s hopes for a dramatic career shift were frustrated. He turned increasingly to the theatre and died, in 1958, aged only 44. Annoyed by and fearful of Goulding’s debauchery in an increasingly hostile political climate, Zanuck used the failure of ‘Nightmare Alley’ to run the director’s career into the ground. William Gresham, author of the original book, couldn’t repeat its success and became a raging drunk himself. After their divorce, his wife, Joy Gresham, moved to England, where she met C.S. Lewis, their story told in the 1993 film ‘Shadowlands‘.

And, in 2010, the success of Paul McKenna, Derren Brown and Derek Acorah shows that the carnie, in his various guises, most definitely lives on.