for the mayor.

‘nightmare alley’ is the first tyrone power movie I have ever seen. my best friend Emily loooooooooooooooves tyrone power, but i’ve just never gotten around to him. But after reading an article in ‘city journal’ about why black-and-white movies were so great, mentioning that power plays the part of a geek in the 1947 film, well, it went immediately to the top of my netflix queue.

power plays stan, a low-life carnie (thank you, movie, for re-enforcing the stereotype that carnies are inevitably low-lifes) who flirts with pretty molly (thank you, movie, for letting the pretty girl have my name) but is more interested in zeena the fortune teller, because she once made a bundle on a telepathic act with her drunkard of a husband, pete. what he wants from zeena is the code that made the trick a success – by the way, the code seems way too complicated to ever work properly. stan sort of accidentally feeds pete a quart of wormwood, but at least he’s out of the way. he ends up being forced to marry molly by zeena and molly’s strong man boyfriend. molly and stan start an act with the code, and are instantly playing ritzy nightclubs and living in a posh hotel. things go from bad to worse when stan reaches a bit too high, going in with a scary psychoanalyst to con a rich man. things lose all semblance of sense as stan is then transformed into some sort of religious hero. the ending looks like it’s on the fast track to depressing, and the uplifting final twist is a disservice to the grimness of the rest of the film.

one thing i learned – boy, is tyrone power good at sleazy! especially in a tuxedo, for some reason. and by the film’s end, he was positively demonic. ihe relationship between sleazy stan and adorable, naïve molly is not the most convincing love story of our time, although there is one fabulous scene where her train is pulling out and he jumps up to kiss her one more time. sadly, the images conjured up in my head by the word ‘geek’ (namely the excellent novel ‘geek love’ by katherine dunn) were not fulfilled by the film. you hear the geek screaming, at the beginning, and then every time stan gets a little drunk, but there’s no actual scenes of his….geekiness. it was a decent film, the plot was certainly a little different from the majority of film noir. and that psychoanalyst was enough to scare you off of shrinks forever.

but i was so hoping to see tyrone power bite the head off of a chicken.