Nightmare Alley

Has anyone seen this I'm thinking of getting it. Has a controversial kind of tag, quite brutal etc..I have seen most of the classic Noirs but not this one. Like Kiss me Deadly, Night of Hunter, Gun Crazy etc.. Worth it????? Actually trying to decide between this and Mildred Pierce.

Oh dear I have already asked this question on Film noir thread. What a Faux Pas. Time for a lie down.

I've seen it. It's not a patch on the excellent book, but it's still quite good. On par with Mildred Pierce (which is also not a patch on the book.)

the musical!
http://www.geffenplayhouse.com/nightmarealley

not interested tbh
definitely worth seeing hinklepicker

reading this now - got a copy of the flick for after

I love this film.

Hoately grabbed the youth by the shirt front and drew him nearer. “Listen, kid. Do I have to draw you a damn blueprint? You pick up a guy and he ain’t a geek—he’s a drunk. A bottle-a-day booze fool. So you tell him like this: ‘I got a little job for you. It’s a temporary job. We got to get a new geek. So until we do you’ll put on the geek outfit and fake it.’ You tell him, ‘You don’t have to do nothing. You’ll have a razor blade in your hand and when you pick up the chicken you give it a nick with the blade and then make like you’re drinking the blood. Same with rats. The marks don’t know no different.”’

Hoately ran his eye up and down the midway, sizing up the crowd. He turned back to Stan. “Well, he does this for a week and you see to it that he gets his bottle regular and a place to sleep it off in. He likes this fine. This is what he thinks is heaven. So after a week you say to him like this, you say, ‘Well, I got to get me a real geek. You’re through.’ He scares up at this because nothing scares a real rummy like the chance of a dry spell and getting the horrors. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t I doing okay?’ So you say, ‘Like crap you’re doing okay. You can’t draw no crowd faking a geek. Turn in your outfit. You’re through.’ Then you walk away. He comes following you, begging for another chance and you say, ‘Okay. But after tonight out you go.’ But you give him his bottle.

“That night you drag out the lecture and lay it on thick. All the while you’re talking he’s thinking about sobering up and getting the crawling shakes. You give him time to think it over, while you’re talking. Then throw in the chicken. He’ll geek.”

Hadn't seen this in a long while. First half-hour is great, esp that scene where Power preps the way for the death of his drunken obstacle (Ian Keith) to Joan Blondell and a career.

The rest of it's alright -- including Coleen Gray, until she gets the "You can't go against God" duties -- but the psychoanalyst fatale thing is kinda on-the-nose misogynistic, and Hoberman had a point calling it "excitingly tawdry, as well as self-defeatingly slick."

pretty good piece by Gary Giddins:

http://www.nysun.com/arts/pool-of-primal-fear/15378/

Tiny bit of discussion on this thread: NYRB Publishing

Guillermo del Toro will co-write (with Kim Morgan), direct, and produce a remake of Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley, reports Variety’s Justin Kroll, noting that the original “starred Tyrone Power as an ambitious young con-man who hooks up with a female psychiatrist who is even more corrupt than he is. At first, they enjoy success fleecing people with their mentalist act, but then she turns the table on him, out-manipulating the manipulator.”

http://variety.com/2017/film/news/guillermo-del-toro-scott-cooper-antlers-nightmare-alley-1202637543/

Saw the remake last night - it's very very good. Hope other folks see it...

The design is to die for. But the storytelling doesn't do anything the 1947 version didn't do better.

I knew there was going to be a black-and-white version. But on 35mm in some theaters? Damn you Del Toro, but take my money.

The man's been "style over substance" since Pan's Labyrinth - his last great film, in my opinion.

The design is to die for. But the storytelling doesn't do anything the 1947 version didn't do better.

This is otm. It's remarkable how little del Toro adds to the 1947 version, yet it somehow manages to be 40 minutes longer. The additional material del Toro did come up with - Stanton's "did he or didn't he?" backstory with his father, the revelation that Grindle is a serial killer (wtf?!) - didn't add anything to the film imho & just felt like padding. Still, completely gorgeous to look at.

I liked this more than I expected to.

why this thing so fucking looooooong

Annoyed me less than most other GDTs or maybe it a just that I’m glad not to be watching The Shape of Water whenever I’m watching literally any other movie that isn’t The Shape of Water. But to not show you know who biting the head off a chicken in the final shot means he’ll never shake off the prestige.

It had been a long time since I had last seen the original 1947 one, and even with Darryl F. Zanuck shitting all over it (Ms. Telecom's reaction to the Zanuck-mandated ending was a raw "what the fuck is this?), the screenplay and acting feels more like something you would see 20-30 years later. I still hope folks got a chance to see the remake even though it's the more old fashioned of the two.

Kinda shocked to see how much of a flop this was.

I kinda expected a genre nerd like GDT to do noir homage right, but this suffered from the usual trappings of such things, lingering over cosmetics to the determinant of any kind of narrative momentum. And, echoing several posts upthread, that running time is absurd.

I kinda expected a genre nerd like GDT to do noir homage right, but this suffered from the usual trappings of such things, lingering over cosmetics to the determinant of any kind of narrative momentum.

Replace "noir" with "Victorian gothic horror" and the same criticism applies to Crimson Peak

I’m sad Morbius didn’t get to see the remake.

This was a perfect airplane film - ate up lots of time and pulled you into its weird world extremely effectively. I loved it. Did a great job making you root for Bradley Cooper for far longer than you should.

And like.. the cast! My god.

I liked it a lot as well. My fave GdT in a while.