Many experienced filmgoers know that sometimes the real star of a film is its cinematographer. Oscar-winning Lee Garmes was one of the most respected of Hollywood’s early cameramen who worked with many of Hollywood’s legendary directors, from Josef von Sternberg to Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. In “Nightmare Alley,” Director Edmund Goulding’s 1947 gem-noir tale of obsessed ambition, Garmes nearly steals the show with the cluttered gloomy carnival grounds and tents, gloomy torch-lit nights, circus-like caravans, dark shadowy urban streets, seedy hotel rooms and lots of low-lit close-ups of corruption and deception.

“Nightmare Alley” stars Tyrone Power as Stanton “Stan” Carlisle as a carnival sideshow worker who becomes a part of the carnival mentalist/mind reader’s act, rising to big-time fame in Chicago as a nightclub spiritualist, until his string of lies and deceptions turn most of the world against him.

Joan Blondell is the mystic Zeena “The Miracle Woman” Krumbein, whose alcoholic husband Pete drops out of the act and dies after drinking grain alcohol allowing Stan to take his place. This haunting adaptation of a William Lindsay Gresham novel was scripted by Jules Furthman. Twentieth-Century Fox head, Darryl F. Zanuck, was reportedly so upset with the film’s “distasteful” tone that he pulled it from circulation after its initial release for nearly a decade.

By the late ‘40s, Power was trying to shed his pretty-boy matinee idol reputation — he was his generation’s version of the ‘80s Tom Cruise. So, he began seeking more challenging roles, like the obsessed con man Stan Carlisle. Likewise, Blondell was attempting meatier leading performances after more than a decade of featured roles in a series of studio films. Both delivered outstanding performances.

In the film’s first scenes, Stan appears in a simple white T-shirt, smoking a cigarette and roaming the carnival grounds before he meets with the carnival boss and Zeena. He tells Zeena how he loves the carnival, but he feels so much more superior to the usual carnival-goers. He also can’t seem to understand how some of the pathetic carnival performers can fall so low, like the crazed carny who performs as the mysterious Greek who eats live chickens.

When Stan joins Zeena’s act, he quickly learns her secret “code” of audience deception, and after much success, they decide to leave the carnival for bigger venues. Goulding complicates the story when Stan takes interest in Molly (Colleen Gray), a younger carnival performer who makes Zeena immediately jealous, as well as an older fellow performer Bruno, who is part of Molly’s act.

Stan marries Molly, and they head off to Chicago, where he is featured nightly in fashionable nightclubs as “The Great Stanton.” Here, he begins mixing religious spiritualism into his mindreading show. In one show, he falls into a quasi-hypnotic state that ends in a fainting spell.

His act draws the attention of Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), a psychiatrist who initially thinks Stan is just a con man, but later collaborates with him in his manipulation of several wealthy Chicagoans, including a Mrs. Peabody who believes Stan spiritually connects her to her late daughter. So pleased by her revelations, Peabody declares, “I’ll build you the finest tabernacle in the world.” When Stan rejects his old friend Zeena and even uses his wife in more deceptions of wealthy donors, Stan’s world falls in on him.

Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg note in their book “Hollywood in the Forties” that “‘Nightmare Alley’ is a work of great daring, even risking a few shots at the human belief in immortality. People are shown as venal, gullible and hell-bent on success at any cost. Lee Garmes’s photography effectively evokes the circus settings, the film’s greatest triumph lies in its uncompromising portrait of American corruption.”

And where I’m usually very skeptical of modern-day remakes, I’m quite excited about this Christmas’ release of Guillermo del Toro’s modern retelling of “Nightmare Alley.” With del Toro’s impressive visual styling in films like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape of Water” and a cast that features Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett, this should make for an outstanding cinematic experience.

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