One of the blackest American film noirs of the 1940s, Nightmare Alley is fascinating if only for the amount of cynical, sordid material it presents as a matter of course. A study of the dark side of the entertainment world, it presents a host of noir characters whose soulless ambition is terrifying enough to place the film on the cusp of the horror genre. Tyrone Power is effectively cast against type as a mind-reader in a carnival side-show who ascends a ladder made of gullible women almost to the top--nearly cornering the religious-cult market in Chicago--before plummeting to the depths of carnival-life degradation that had so fascinated him in his climbing days: employed as a geek, he chews off the heads of chickens in return for a bottle and a bed for the night. Nightmare Alley was too extreme to be a great box-office success, and critically it was a case of you-can't-win-for-losing: while the New York Times noted its “shocking lack of good taste,” recent reassessments have cited Edmund Goulding--director of Grand Hotel and The Razor's Edge--for failing to acknowledge cinematically the depths to which the story sinks: “Nightmare Alley is the quintessential ‘B' movie spoiled by an ‘A' production,” laments Clive T. Miller in his book, Kings of the Bs.