Most people are more familiar with Bobby Vee's pop hit of 1962 than the original film, although they both make rather irrelevant use of such a terrific title.
Playing like a quickie rehash of Edmund Goulding's haunting gothic melodrama of the previous year, 'Nightmare Alley' - but with a more pronounced supernatural element - the film not very convincingly spans twenty years while John Farrow's restless camera and John Seitz's superb deep focus photography serve simply to heighten the sense of rather cramped theatricality as people stand around and talk. The action is rendered more garrulous still by the first half of the film being played out in flashback with Robinson narrating, before proceeding to an abrupt (but still talky) conclusion.
Playing like a quickie rehash of Edmund Goulding's haunting gothic melodrama of the previous year, 'Nightmare Alley' - but with a more pronounced supernatural element - the film not very convincingly spans twenty years while John Farrow's restless camera and John Seitz's superb deep focus photography serve simply to heighten the sense of rather cramped theatricality as people stand around and talk. The action is rendered more garrulous still by the first half of the film being played out in flashback with Robinson narrating, before proceeding to an abrupt (but still talky) conclusion.