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Nightmare Alley on DVD (1947)
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Tyrone Power, 20th Century-Fox's most bankable and romantic leading man at the time, gave his image a jolt with this bizarre study of mental breakdown, in which he was reunited with his Razor's Edge director, Edmund Goulding. Power is a bogus mind-reader in a small-time carnival who revives Joan Blondell and Ian Keith's long forgotten act as a means to get rich, with tragic results. The picture is a curious hybrid: bits of Tod Browning's notorious 1932 film, Freaks, and Freudian psycho-babble from Hitchcock's Spellbound are drafted in, and the result is peculiarly, gloomily hypnotic. The script, by Jules Furthman, is based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham, a writer obsessed by the emotional nakedness of circus performance who eventually committed suicide.
Unusual road to ruin melodrama, a striking oddity from Hollywood at the time, and still quite interesting and well done. Members ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
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