Is a guy born like that? Roustabout Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) joins a traveling carny and unsuccessfully schemes to figure out the mind-reading act of Mademoiselle Zeena (Joan Blondell) and her alcoholic husband, Pete (Ian Keith) that had once brought them to the top of vaudeville using a secret code that made her appear to have extraordinary mental gifts. But when Pete dies after drinking wood alcohol instead of moonshine, Zeena is forced to take on Stan as a partner, and he quickly proves more gifted than his predecessor. Ambitious to a fault, Stan abandons Zeena and the carny to reinvent himself as The Great Stanton, accompanied by young Molly (Coleen Gray), another carny worker, whom he’s been forced into marrying, wowing high-class audiences in a Chicago hotel. He attracts the interest of a psychiatrist Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker) he attends, plagued with guilt from having taken Zeena’s code to better himself and causing Pete’s death. When Molly proves too kind to go through with a long con on a wealthy patient of Lilith’s, Ezra Grindle (Taylor Holmes), Stan discovers he’s been the victim himself of their mutual psychiatrist … You never give up. Jules Furthman’s adaptation of the novel by Winston Lindsay Gresham takes a luridly melodramatic story of criminality and brings out the pathos and tragic irony of a man whose inner moral compass is twisted and ultimately self-destructive. Power fought to bring this to the screen and he’s great in this rise and fall tale that amazingly for 1947 casts a psychiatrist as a villain. Sordid and unsavoury, Power is practically tortured, learning that the life of a grifter has an inevitable outcome in the failure he had already witnessed at first hand in the down and outs in the carnival. It was a most unusual film for him at the peak of his career as a romantic lead and hero of swashbuckling stories but he desperately wanted a serious role. The head of Twentieth Century-Fox Darryl F. Zanuck toned down the ending but it’s still a dark even brutal narrative. Directed by the prolific British filmmaker Edmund Goulding, who had worked with Power in creating another great screen role, that of Larry Darrell in the Maugham adaptation The Razor’s Edge, the previous year. This was a monumental flop because Zanuck did no publicity and swiftly removed it from circulation despite Power’s fabulous reviews fearing he would lose his valuable leading man. It has the contours of greatness. How astonishing that Power managed to make this at the age of just 33 and in that system. He reached too high
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