Nightmare Alley

One of the darkest and most startling films ever to come out of golden-era Hollywood, based on a novel that many thought unfilmable at a time when the Production Code held sway, Nightmare Alley is set in the gritty yet surreal world of a travelling carnival, whose eccentric inhabitants serve up bizarre illusions to a grateful and gullible public. Tyrone Power’s ruthless schemer, Stanton Carlisle, was his favorite of all his roles, and no wonder: it stretched him like nothing before or since as Carlisle rises from raffish carnival barker to national mind-reading sensation in partnership with his beautiful wife Molly (Coleen Gray), before an equally precipitous fall at the hands of a duplicitous psychologist (Helen Walker) and his own all too human frailties. Director Edmund Goulding conjures a spellbinding atmosphere out of some of the weirdest material ever to be tackled by a major studio. (Signal One Entertainment)