Which films in our joint recollection begin with the main protagonist as a successful individual and end with his/her self-inflicted and total humiliation.
For example:
The Blue Angel
When this sorry tale begins, Immanuel Rath is a respectable teacher at a high school. At the story’s end, aided by an obsessive liaison with Lola Lola, he is a clown in Lola’s troupe having eggs broken over his head every night. He dies, humiliated, destitute, and rejected.
Carrie (1952)
Restaurant manager George Hurstwood falls in love with Carrie but loses his family, house, and job after beginning a relationship with Carrie. He falls fast into poverty and the story ends with him starving and destitute.
I’ll see your The Blue Angel and raise you The Blue Max.. Bruno Stachel has to die before being court martialed and disgracing the German officer corps, all because (aside from claiming kills that weren’t his) he trusts his mistress to keep her mouth shut.
Nightmare Alley kind of fits this category, although he isn’t successful at the very beginning, he becomes very succesful, and, by the end, is about as low he thought he could be.
Protagonist (we root for), self-inflicted ruin, no third act comeback. Narrows the field ruling out even non-Hollywood formula like The Last Laugh (1924 German), Balzac’s Colonel Chabert (he gets screwed but not self-inflicted), and every Jesus movie (unless you consider the Cleansing of the Temple “If I dood it, I get a whippin’” self-infliction).
Maybe any number of artist biopics, like Bird, about Charlie Parker, or The Comic, about Buster Keaton/Stan Laurel.
American Indians like Ira Hayes and Jim Thorpe did themselves dirt IRL, but Hollywood softened it as much as possible, while casting them with non-Indians.
“Mac” McTeague is a man who builds himself up from nothing into having successful dental practice. His wife wins the lottery, and the greed of him, his wife, and his best friend destroy them. In the final scene, he ends up in the middle of Death Valley, with no horse, no water, and handcuffed to his (former) best friend’s corpse.
Barton Fink starts with the title character celebrating the success of his newest play and accepting an offer to write screenplays for Hollywood. By the end of the film, his dreams of success have been thoroughly crushed, and his parents and uncle have very possibly been murdered.
Film noir seems like a good place to find some of these characters, like both Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, and the less-prosperous Ned Racine in Body Heat.
Isaac in Manhattan quits his job as a TV producer, has to move to a crappy apartment, loses two girlfriends, finds out his best friend is a backstabber, and has his sexual secrets revealed to the world when his ex-wife publishes a tell-all book.
Lina Wertmüller‘s The Seduction of Mimi might qualify.
The protagonist manages to steer clear of the subjugated life the mafia has slated him for, but when his wife cheats on him, rather than accept it since he’s already made a life with another woman himself, he has to seduce the wife of his wife’s lover. The fish-eye lens shot of the prelude to the act is not to be missed.
In The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950), a veteran homicide detective (Lee J Cobb) throws away his career and freedom trying to cover up a murder committed by his mistress (Jane Wyatt). It’s fun to watch his elaborate scheme unravel bit by bit—mostly at the hands of his own brother, who is also a cop.
That reminds me of the only Mickey Rooney movie I like: Quicksand. His character commits bigger and bigger crimes to cover each previous one. The only consolation: the woman he started the whole thing for promises to wait for him.
The circumstances are extremely spoilery, but it’s enough to say that the prosperity at the beginning is ironic and very much “relative,” and the nature of the defeat at the end depends entirely on one’s perspective.
There is a great example of this in poor Lily Bart in The movie adaptation of The House of Mirth. She starts as a well-off socialite, but through a series of bad decisions and misapprehensions basically bankrupts herself and puts herself at the mercy of the people she looked down on at the beginning of the movie. Spoiler alert – she doesn’t get much mercy, though the movie is slightly kinder to her than the book.
