Year: 1947
Director: Edmund Goulding
Country: US
Language: English
This week I bought 25 movie tickets (1 package of 20 "regular" screenings & 1 package of 5 "premium" screenings) to Toronto International Film Festival 2021, which runs Sept 9th -18th 2021. One film I hope to be announced is Guillermo Del Toro's Nightmare Alley. It is a remake of Edmund Goulding's classic starring Bradley Cooper, which will no doubt earn both director and actor awards come award season. In anticipation of seeing Toro's premiere, I decided to check out the original.
Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power) is a mentalist who, after working & learning his profession at a circus, seeks to make it big by deceiving people out of their money.
Nightmare Alley's carnival culture turns the American dream on its head; exposing the American's feverish desire to make quick cash at the expense of their fellow man. The movie gives us a complicated set of feelings about all these characters. The character Electra amazes us with her display of electricity; the geek makes us pity their inhumane treatment; and Stanton hits us in the gut with his cold outlook, admitting "I'm never thinking about anybody—except myself.”
Based on the best selling novel by William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley was full of controversial material that had to be plucked apart by a great screenwriter in order to make it on the screen, and even with the Hays Code overseeing its censorship the film proved to be quite dark and melancholy. The atmosphere of paranoia, deception and fear, all enhanced by the wicked performances of Tyrone Power & Joan Blondell, seep into our mind & infect our anxieties.
Nightmare Alley is a spectacular film noir that would make an excellent companion to the outlandish Freaks (1931) It made me quite uncomfortable at times, albeit I was entertained throughout the run-time. The Criterion Edition of this picture is a must buy.
No comments:
Post a Comment