Mademoiselle Zeena

Before we learn exactly who Ms. Zeena Krumbein is, she’s seen standing outside her carnival tent. The wind is blowing and the raucous sounds of the carnival are heard around envelope her. There’s a strange look on her face, too. Is it worry? Is it guilt? Or does she just know a heckuva lot more than anybody else? Later we’ll see plenty of Zeena (played with zealous self-awareness by Joan Blondell), but that opening shot does something which only cinema can do: it takes us completely into the mind of a character even before we’re given details about them.

From there on its Nightmare Alley, Edmund Goulding’s woeful, inky and deathly serious film about a carnival performer picked up by the claws of fame. Its one of the grimmest pieces of noir you’re likely to find, ranking with Double Indemnity and Out of the Past on the doom and gloom scale.

Stan and Zeena

When we first meet Stanton “Stan” Carlisle, he’s walking around his carnival home like a lost puppy dog, fascinated by one of the carnival’s most popular acts: The Geek, a wild man/animal creature who lives in a cage, biting off the heads of animals for show. “How do you get a guy to be a geek?” Stan asks the carnival manager, “Is that the only one … I mean, is a guy born that way?”

“Listen, kid,” the gruff manager replies, “when you’ve been around this carny a little longer, you’ll learn to quit asking questions.”

Fair enough.

In the next few moments it’s revealed that Stan is a carnival hand, spending his days announcing Mademoiselle Zeena, the carnival’s resident mentalist. Although he knows some of her tricks, he’s just as fascinated with the way people look in wonder as she apparently reads minds. It’s the kind of charisma that used to make Zeena and her alcoholic husband Pete top-billing every evening at the carnival. Like any legitimate mentalism team, the two of them would use a shrewd and secret code to communicate between each other, giving the illusion of telepathy.

Lots of people are jealous of the code, making Stan particularly fascinated. Zeena won’t give up the code, but when her husband Pete dies unexpectedly of wood alcohol poisoning, Stan finds himself in a place of tremendous opportunity. Realizing his talent for mentalism after convincing a concerned sheriff to leave the fairgrounds, Stan leaves the carnival behind and the typical trappings of fame and fortune follow: a shotgun marriage to a beautiful, innocent young girl, adoring fans, and sold out events at classy nightclubs.

Nightmare Alley was very much Tyrone Power’s project. The star of such Saturday-afternoon matinée flicks as The Mark of Zorro and Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake, he had a great desire to shed his swashbuckling, popcorny image by moving into darker, more serious territory. And just watch how he adapts to the material. The role requires an almost 180-degree change in his character and the change is easily seen in his facial features – the genuine wonderment Stan has at the beginning becomes old hat, the high-water pants and white t-shirt are traded in for a full tuxedo, his hair goes from attractively disheveled to devilishly slicked down, and those awe-filled eyes turn into bottomless pits of duplicity.

The stylistic approach is distinctly noirish and helped tremendously by cinematographer Lee Garmes. Like many additions to the film noir catalogue, Nightmare Alley is a good reminder of just how beautiful black and white photography can be. Films such as these only strengthen the argument for black and white being more evocative than color ever can be. The carnival atmosphere of the film’s first half offers the perfect environment for hazy light patterns and shifting shadows and the same goes for one of the final scenes which takes place in a beautifully lit outdoor garden.

Two examples of Lee Garmes' beautiful photography

Still, while the film goes along with the typical noir convention of a good guy brought to his knees at the hands of a conniving femme fatale, its subject matter is a huge departure for the genre partly due to the “carny” atmosphere with which William Lindsey Gresham (the author of the novel of the same title) was so familiar. Alongside this comes a fascination with Eastern mysticism and spiritualism, a subject matter that other noirs (and even other films from this period) rarely delve into.

One of Zeena's secrets to mentalism

From the beginning we realize Zeena’s mentalism act is all a hoax. Stan is seen delivering the carnival patron’s questions through a backdoor in the stage to Pete who transcribes them onto a chalkboard shown to Zeena through a concealed hole in a table (see picture). Tricky, but absolutely legitimate. This is why it comes as surprise to Stan (and the viewer) when her faith and reliance in the tarot is discovered. Why would a woman who spends her days deceiving people with an illusion of the supernatural rely so much on the tarot? Stan is a skeptic and it’s debatable that he remains one through the rest of the film even after he makes a career of mentalism.

Zeena is a different sort of fatal female; she’s not a Phyllis Dietrichson, spinning a sticky web for unwitting men to fall into, but neither is she a completely innocent pure spirit like Molly, the young woman Stan will marry. Stan’s downfall doesn’t come from his giving into Zeena’s feminine wiles or belief in the tarot, but by taking the twisted trappings of her worldview (including a willingness to deceive people) to a whole new level. Even though the hints of a romance between them never fully develop, she remains the most influential figure in Stan’s career for even when he separates himself from her, the ideas remain an irrevocable part of him.

Ian Keith as Pete

Zeena’s alcoholic husband Pete is impeccably played by Ian Keith. Pete is the only character who undermines Tyrone Power’s charm when on screen. Even though he’s only present in the first 25 minutes, Keith makes him uniquely memorable and although it was never recognized as such, it’s the best embodiment of one of film noir’s most popular conventions: the despairing drunk.

It’s fascinating to watch as Stan’s fortune-making talent turns into a lust for glory that gets the best of him. His skill in mentalism soon leads him into the deception of innocent people for personal gain and with a heavy dose of twisted irony, we soon learn what happens when a guy spends his life reaching way too high for the top rung of fortune’s ladder. At the hands of Zeena’s mysticism and his own emerging, insufferable ego, Stan finds himself in a place where the misty shadow of The Geek looms in anticipation and the words of the old drunk Pete offer a more fitting description of himself than any of those top-billing programs ever could: “Just a bottle a day rum-dum who thinks [this carny] job is heaven as long he has a bottle a day and a dry place to sleep it off in.”

Be it in style, subject matter, or depth of performance, Nightmare Alley is a film ahead of its time – that is, until the last five minutes. Apparently Gresham’s novel had an appropriately dismal ending, but when the final moments of the film come, the Hays Code rears its often ugly head. When things get depressing near the end, a saccharine flourish of music is cued and we’re thrown into an entirely predictable scene of pseudo-redemptive sentimentality.

There’s a memorable and thought-provoking coda after this gooey blunder, and it doesn’t change the fact that the rest of Nightmare Alley is a hard-edged and beautifully acted film. As a piece of noir, it has noticeable differences from its predecessors and offers a welcome diversion from the grittiness of the city streets.