The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of. Or At Least Nightmares. by Dave Goode

There are certain movies that I watch at least twice a year. Nightmare Alley (1947) is one of those movies. This classic of cinema noir was based on the best selling book from 1946 written by William Lindsay Gresham. I saw the movie for the first time when I was about fourteen or fifteen. And it just blew me away.

Directed by Edmund Goulding with a screenplay by Jules Furthman  the movie
stars Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray and Helen Walker. The movie is very unsettling. But not nearly as much as Gersham's novel that doesn't have a tacked on Hollywood "happy ending". The movie tells the story of carnival conman Stanton "Stan" Carlisle and his rise and fall. Tyrone Power is great playing against type. But is he really? That roguish smile and sparkle in his eye fits the sharpshooter Carlisle as perfectly as it did his swashbuckling Diego Vega alias el Zorro, the Fox. And both characters play the people around them as marks.

The other standout to me in this film is Joan Blondell who is second-billed after Power. She plays Zeena, the fortune teller one of the women Carlisle uses on his climb to the top. Forty-One at the time of the film. She brings an earthy sensuality to the role. Coleen Gray, one of my favorite actresses has little to do here but play naively innocent. She is the most moral person in this film. And she's always nice to look. Helen Walker is also nice to look at as Lilith Walker , woman he's unable to use. A classic noir femme fatale who causes Carlisle's fall.

Also good in a small role is former pro wrestler turned actor Mike Mazurki. He
plays Bruno , the slow-witted carnival strongman. He looks exactly what you would expect a strongman in a small time carnival to look like.

The funny thing is until I read the book I thought that the "Nightmare Alley" of the title was the midway of the second rate Ten-in-One carnival that the movie begins in. It's actually reference to a recurring nightmare Carlisle has.






Legendary underground comic book creator Spain Rodriguez produced a great graphic novel adaptation of Gresham's novel. But the artist I always imagined illustrating the story was Steve Ditko.

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