CS Film Club II

Nightmare Alley

Well, this was pretty darn cool. Nightmare Alley is neat, a film noir less in its aesthetics or tropes, but more in its tone and general sense of cynicism. The story involves Stan Carlisle, a carnival barker who becomes a master of hot and cold reading tricks, and uses these skills to elevate himself from carnival sideshow to high-class magician scamming rich people in ritzy Chicago nightclubs. A lot of the film's fun comes from its process. I loved watching how Stan develops his system, both how he "reads" strangers for information as well as the coded language he and his assistant use to communicate that information. Tyrone Power gives a strong lead performance and is unassuming enough that his moral decay carries real weight. The showstealer though is Helen Walker as a psychiatrist who gets involved in the con and is just a wonderfully shifty character. Their final scene together is just exquisite.

If the film has any weakness, it's that it perhaps rambles just a little bit too long after hitting a third act peak. Not a major problem exactly but I do feel it could have ended stronger. Still, I rather liked Nightmare Alley, to the point that I'm a little worried about Guillermo del Toro's version. I'm certainly intrigued by how he'll bring the material to life visually, but this story still holds up really well. What a cool movie.

A-



Sergeant Rutledge

This is another one of those John Ford movies that was not especially acclaimed in its day but whose status has grown substantially in the years since. For my part, I liked it a lot. What is most notable is how explicitly the film tackles anti-Black racism within the U.S. cavalry and in American society more broadly. You could certainly accuse the film of being another example of the white savior given it's ultimately centered on a heroic white lawyer defending a Black man, but there's some key nuances here worth noting. For one, Ford seems keenly sympathetic to why Rutledge would flee in the first place given the fear of Black masculinity and sexuality in American culture. Also noteworthy is Billie Burke's character, who at first seems mostly a comic-relief old lady but reveals herself to be one of the most explicitly racist characters of all. I'm reminded of The Searchers, where Vera Miles seems an icon of femininity and virtue only to betray scathing racial hatred towards the end. In both cases, Ford emphasizes how white womanhood can be used to cloak vile racism, and, more generally, how racist values can be wrapped in the not banal of attitudes and peoples, not just outright villains.

The film is also just a really well-directed Western with some very well executed sequences. I especially liked the lighting of the courtroom scenes to indicate a shift into flashbacks, but the more conventional Western excitement is as rousing as you'd imagine from Ford. Where the film is a bit less successful is as a courtroom drama. I'm not one to nitpick the details of a trial (especially for a movie set in 1881) but by the time Jeffrey Hunter is slapping the shit out of the guy on the stand I couldn't help but chuckle. I also think the film could have made more of its flashback structure. Still, this is a quality John Ford picture and a testament to the man's continued relevance even in 1960.

A-


Skink, I'll hopefully get to The Swimmer soon.