DIRECTOR: Edmund Goulding
PRODUCER: George Jessel
PRODUCTION CO: 20th Century Fox
SCREENPLAY: Jules Furthman, based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham
PHOTOGRAPHY: Lee Garmes
EDITOR: Barbara McLean
MUSIC: ​Cyril J Mockridge
WITH: Tyrone Power (Stan Carlisle), Joan Blondell (Zeena Krumbein), Coleen Gray (Molly Carlisle), Helen Walker (Lilith Ritter), Taylor Holmes (Ezra Grindle), Mike Mazurki (Bruno), Ian Keith (Pete Krumbein) 

REVIEW

“Darkness lurks behind the bright lights of a traveling carnival in one of the most haunting and perverse film noirs of the 1940s. Adapted from the scandalous best seller by William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley gave Tyrone Power a chance to subvert his matinee-idol image with a ruthless performance as Stanton Carlisle, a small-time carny whose unctuous charm propels him to fame as a charlatan spiritualist, but whose unchecked ambition leads him down a path of moral degradation and self-destruction. Although its strange, sordid atmosphere shocked contemporary audiences, this long-difficult-to-see reflection of postwar angst has now taken its place as one of the defining noirs of its era – a fatalistic downward slide into existential oblivion..”

— Criterion

“The picture wasn't made on the cheap, as so many noirs were: shot by the great and extraordinarily versatile cinematographer Lee Garmes… Nightmare Alley has a suitably sinister, gritty shimmer. It conjures elements of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and points toward the work Diane Arbus would do some 10 years later…

The screenplay for Nightmare Alley – by veteran writer Jules Furthman (The Big Sleep, To Have and To Have Not, Mutiny on the Bounty) – doesn't make the story's foreboding twists and turns easy for the audience. The movie is resolute in the bleakness of its vision. And for that reason, it stands as a bold example of a mainstream work that doesn't talk down to its audience, that trusts viewers to follow it down some very dark pathways… Nightmare Alley is a work of desolate beauty, a vision conjured from the troubled side of sleep.”

– Stephanie Zacharek, TCM

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Palmerston North
Wednesday, 29 March, 6.00pm

​Nelson     
Tuesday, 25 April, 6.00pm

​Hamilton  
Monday, 22 May, 6.30pm

​Auckland  
Monday, 29 May, 6.15pm

Whanganui  
Monday, 19 June, 7.00pm

Wellington     
Monday, 06 November, 6.15pm ​

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