One of the darkest of the American film noirs of the 1940s, 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 sideshow, who ascends a ladder of gullible women all the way 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. “Nightmare Alley is the quintessential B movie spoiled by an A production” (Clive T. Miller, Kings of the Bs).