Nightmare Alley

Pretty filthy noir, directed by Edmund Goulding and starring Tyrone Power. 1947.
We have our opening that establishes, clear as day, the location, the psychologies, and the mystery. The figure of the Geek is primed for us throughout, and it doesn't take a genius to work out what will inevitably happen.
The visual style, with some not excessive hard cross-lighting, is for generally tighter framings, tracking before pans, and long takes with a moving frame.
The interesting formal point here is the way the narrative develops. We have long scenes, with a quick hanging cause plotline usually put to bed near the start, and then it gets strange. Their is a development of another strand (this isn't every scene, but the middle ones), often supernatural, mindreading, fated, uncanny, that mysteriously folds out. And then we return, at the very end, to a more romantic/ straightforward line, that often, perhaps accounting for this film's slightly slow pace, ties something up rather than leaving it hanging to rush into the next scene. Note here that the supernatural development is really secondary to the more traditional narrative; it seems almost non-diegetic at times, coming, unconnected, from a different world, stuffed into a film that is really organised by more usual cause-effect.
The general effect is a deeplt uncomfortable one. Pretty much every character, especially Power, is repellent, disgusting, immoral in more than just a Hollywood way. The tricks they play, the downright nasty undermining and mockery (that is the really nasty part) makes one uncomfortable, as intended. It gives the film a strange air; perhaps heightened by the costumes, the mannish woman psychiatrist, the out of place feel of heaviness.
As we near the end the scenes connect more obviously, leaving the threads of one to be knotted in the next. The clearly absurd ending, rushed even before the very last surely deeply sarcastic 'happy ending' (we've seen that reform doesn't really happen...), which is perhaps the most obviously inadequate we can remember seeing. A dirty funeral march, an intriguing film.