Nightmare Alley

According to Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation, charlatans and grifters in the new age/mystic con would use the phrase "Are you a friend of Stan Carlisle?", or a variation of it, to confirm that the person they were talking to was in the same line of business.

The recording machine that creates a major plot point is a Wilcox-Gay disc cutter that could record at 78 or 33 rpm on a maximum disk size of ten inches. It cut at a fixed 96 lines per inch. Unfortunatly those specs limited recording time to about 3 minutes at 78 rpm and only a bit more at 33. A real professional would have used something like a Presto which cut 12-inch discs or a broadcasting machine like a Scully that could cut 16-inch disks. Even the FBI used disk cutters in pairs so one could begin recording when the others had used up all their blank disk surface. A much more likely device would have been a wire recorder which despite its limited fidelity could record speech for an hour. These units were not cheap but Dr. Ritter was obviously wealthy. Her Wilcox-Gay recorder had a retail price at that time of about $100.00 and was among the lowest-priced recorders sold.

Featured in Twentieth Century Fox: The First 50 Years (1997)