TCM host Dave Karger welcomes director and screenwriter Guillermo del Toro and screenwriter Kim Morgan as they discuss films that inspired their new version of Nightmare Alley (2021), coming to theaters on December 17, 2021, and starring Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett. The trio will present films from the heyday of the film noir style of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Lizabeth Scott, the noir blonde with the smoky voice, plays one of her characteristic ruthless women, a discontented housewife who accidentally comes into possession of a large sum of stolen money and will do anything to keep it in Too Late for Tears (1949). Directed for the second time by Byron Haskin (I Walk Alone, 1947), she plays a dangerous game with law-abiding husband Arthur Kennedy and noir’s favorite sleazy thug Dan Duryea.
Another indelible fixture of film noir, Dana Andrews (Fallen Angel, 1945; While the City Sleeps, 1956) stars in Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950). He plays a brutal cop who accidentally kills a gambler and falls for his estranged wife (Gene Tierney, Andrews’ co-star in an earlier Preminger film, Laura, 1944). When her innocent cabbie father is accused of the crime, Andrews has to race against time to cover up his deed and shift the blame onto a racketeer.
The evening’s program wraps up with the original version of Nightmare Alley (1947), in which ambitious carney Tyrone Power (cast wildly against his romantic leading man type) cooks up a scheme to bilk rich people by posing as a mentalist, with disastrous results. Jules Furthman (Shanghai Express, 1932; The Big Sleep, 1946) adapted William Lindsay Gresham’s dark, harrowing 1946 novel, with a hopeful ending tacked on by order of Twentieth Century Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. The picture was so distasteful to Zanuck that he had it quickly withdrawn from distribution. Re-released in the mid-1950s, it proved to be a hit, especially on the drive-in circuit. Word is that del Toro and Morgan have stayed closer to the original source material for their new version, hitting theaters in mid-December.
