Director · 1891–1959

Edmund Goulding

2: briefs
13:00: average
26 min: in total

On film.briefs2

Hell's Angels

Howard Hughes, James Whale, Edmund Goulding · 1930

A 1930 American war film directed by Howard Hughes, James Whale, and Edmund Goulding, Hell’s Angels follows two British brothers in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. Originally shot silent, it was converted to sound mid-production, replacing lead actress Greta Nissen with Jean Harlow. Its aerial combat sequences — filmed with over 130 pilots, multiple fatalities, and Hughes’s own crash — remain landmark achievements in early sound and stunt coordination. Though narratively uneven and thematically thin, its technical ambition and material history make it a singular artifact of Hollywood’s transitional decade.

13:00

Nightmare Alley

Edmund Goulding · 1947

Nightmare Alley (1947) follows carnival barker Stanton Carlisle as he masters deception, rises in Chicago society, and implodes under the weight of his own fabrications. Directed by Edmund Goulding from Jules Furthman’s adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel, it stars Tyrone Power in a career-defining turn away from romantic leads. Shot by Lee Garmes and edited by Barbara McLean, the film balances studio polish with unflinching thematic rigour — though its softened ending and underdeveloped urban milieu dilute its fatalism. It remains a landmark of psychological crime cinema, less for its shocks than for its sustained, unsentimental scrutiny of self-deception.