One of the blackest of the American films noirs of the (RQ 40s, Nightmare Alley is amazing for the amount of cynical, sordid material it presents as a matter of course. Tyrone Power is a mind reader in a carnival side show, who ascends a ladder made of gullible women almost to the top - to Chicago, where he is on the verge of fame and fortune as a leader in the pseudo-religion market - and then plunges to the pit of carnival-life degradation (the very pit that had fascinated him in his climbing days) to become a geek, a carnival man-beast who chews off the heads of live chickens in return for a bottle and a bed for the night. You can't get more distasteful than that...or can you? Nightmare Alley was no success, and while some (including James Agee) praised its “moderate” course, its fate was generally attributed to a failure to acknowledge cinematically the depths to which its story sinks. “Nightmare Alley is the quintessential B movie spoiled by an A production” (Clive T. Miller, in “Kings of the Bs”); “Goulding slighted most of the pictorial possibilities inherent in the carnival setting of the first part of the film.... (He) seems to have been almost indecently relieved when, about a third of the way through the film, Power moved his mind-reading act into a posh supper club and he could return to the genteel backgrounds of earlier films like Grand Hotel...and The Razor's Edge” (Charles Hopkins, “Treasures of the UCLA Film Archives”). Still, the New York Sunday Times found it in “shocking lack of good taste,” and the daily Times “a product of its moments of shock and revulsion....” Nightmare Alley is a classic case of you-can't-win. (J.B.)