“I still think it’s underrated”: the movie Quentin Tarantino called “as good as studio filmmaking ever gets”
Is it possible for a classic movie to be underrated? Quentin Tarantino thinks so, and it’s a much more loaded question than it appears at first glance.
The obvious first response is usually, ‘No, they’re called classics for a reason,’ but what about the films that aren’t appreciated in their own time, bomb at the box office, or fly under the radar before eventually receiving the adulation they deserve, long after the dust has settled on their theatrical runs?
Some of the all-time greats that fit that particular bill include John Carpenter’s The Thing, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and even Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which lost over $100,000 in cinemas and wasn’t instantly heralded as the masterpiece most cinephiles know it to be.
Admittedly, Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley doesn’t quite fall into the same camp, since it very rarely, if ever, troubles any list featuring the greatest movies ever made. However, it does tick several of the requisite boxes, having tanked at the box office and received a muted response from critics in 1947 before being recognised as one of the finest examples of film noir ever committed to celluloid.
When most folks think about Nightmare Alley, their mind will inevitably wander toward Guillermo del Toro’s 2021 version, which the Academy Award winner clarified wasn’t a remake of the original but an adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s source novel, with many modern viewers possibly unaware it had already been brought to the screen once before.
Del Toro’s redux also flopped, which can be at least partially attributed to the pandemic, but it did notch four Oscar nods and made the ‘Best Picture’ shortlist. As far as Tarantino can see, though, nothing will come close to beating the original, and his criteria covers every single picture ever released by a major studio.
“While Nightmare Alley is also rightly considered a classic, I still think it’s underrated,” he wrote in Cinema Speculation. “To me, Nightmare Alley is as good as studio filmmaking ever gets. Tyrone Power (who I’ve never been fond of) is fucking sensational in the movie. And the script adaptation by Jules Furthman (one of my handful of nominees for greatest Hollywood screenwriter of all time) is excellent.”
Despite being a 20th Century Fox flick, Tarantino said that “Nightmare Alley feels every inch like an Italian neorealism movie from the same era,” which was pretty much the opposite of the fare being churned out by America’s most notable filmmaking outfits in the 1940s, when the industry largely favoured straightforward genre tales that weren’t all that interested in pushing boundaries or breaking new ground.
For someone who’s seen as many movies as Tarantino, calling Nightmare Alley the pinnacle of studio filmmaking is sky-high praise, even if he most likely wouldn’t take anything released after 2019 under consideration, seeing as he’s convinced that was when cinema died on its arse, probably the day after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood premiered, knowing how much he loves to pat himself on the back.
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