Nightmare Alley

Stan Carlisle is a drifter who signs on with a traveling carnival and works his way into the mind-reading act run by Zeena and her alcoholic husband Pete. What Stan really wants is the secret behind their routine, and once he has it he leaves the carnival behind. Settling in Chicago, he sets himself up as a spiritualist who contacts the dead, aided by a psychiatrist, Lilith Ritter, and by his wife Molly, who performs with him only reluctantly. Their scheme targets wealthy, grieving clients, among them an aging millionaire named Ezra Grindle, who wants to reach his late daughter.

Edmund Goulding directed the film, which 20th Century Fox released in October 1947 and which runs just under two hours. It came to Goulding after The Razor's Edge and before Teenage Rebel, and it sits among the pictures he made across the 1930s and 1940s. Jules Furthman wrote the screenplay, George Jessel produced, and Tyrone Power leads as Stan, with Helen Walker as Lilith Ritter, Coleen Gray as Molly, Joan Blondell as Zeena and Taylor Holmes as Ezra Grindle. Forty-five performers are credited.

On IMDb the film holds 7.7 out of 10 from around 14,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.2 from roughly 243 votes, so the audience score rests on a far larger sample on the first of the two. A critics' rating of 7.8 from 63 reviews puts professional assessment slightly above the wider audience figure on IMDb.