Nightmare Alley (1946)

Stan Carlisle learns to read an audience in a carnival and turns that talent towards increasingly lucrative fraud. Gresham makes advancement resemble escape while preserving the habits and appetites that threaten it. It is excellent on a persuasive speaker's ability to confuse controlling other people with controlling his own future. The carnival and spiritualist settings distinguish it from street-corner crime. Expect exploitation, alcoholism and psychological cruelty, with the business of hope treated very coldly.