Fred Wemyss

I just ordered the DVD of NIGHTMARE ALLEY from the store of my employ. It came to my attention when I was watching the Biography Channel's millionth rerun of its life of Tyrone Power. I'd heard of the movie but had forgotten a mental note I'd once made to myself to get hold of it. The clip from it showed our star emoting to his core and I realized I had to get the movie as soon as possible. Zanuck didn't like the fact that this movie, which Power had lobbied to make, shows him lsing his good looks. Even though the point of the movie was that the main character was falling apart, Zanuck felt the movie audience would stop going to Tyrone Power movies because he was ugly at the end of one of his movies. Zanuck released the movie to as few theatres as he could and let it play for as minimal a run as possible. Zanuck probably resented being pushed by one of his own employees. Edmund Goulding directed it. It was 1946 or so. Goulding's massive hit, GRAND HOTEL, had been made about fourteen years earlier. Hollywood hates artistic movies, actors who become artistic and artists who decline. Zanuck, personifying Hollywood, squashed the movie. Tyrone Power went back to making second-rate swashbucklers, really did lose his looks and died about twelve years later at the age of 46. He'd been a huge star since the age of 23, but by the time he died in 1958, he might as well have been a Civil War vet. He seemed ancient. He was, in fact a vet. He was in some of the fiercest battles of World War Two, in the Pacific. A Pretty Boy made of steel, Tyrone Power had enlisted in the Marines. When he got back from the war he tried to make a movie of substance. That NIGHTMARE ALLEY was made at all is a definite sign of his strength. But Hollywood sapped something vital from Tyrone Power. The country owed some of its freedom to his actions in the Pacific. But he had a fatal heart attack filming one of those sword fights. Poor old George Sanders was the other actor doing take after take in the terrible heat that day. Poor old George Sanders, who killed himself six years later, leaving a note which said, "I leave you to your cesspools." Ah! Hollywood is glorious in its misery. And Tyrone Power fled it briefly, to join the anonymous soldiers whose sisters, girlfriends and mothers would much rather have seen him from a balcony in flickering sumptuousness, in love with every adoring pair of eyes.