Freak Show
With Guillermo Del Toro’s latest love letter to monsters Nightmare Alley, he’s following in well-trodden footsteps – and it’s essential to retrace the path that led him to his version of Nightmare Alley, tweaking and retooling the original crime classic from the 1940s. Dan Schindel walks us through the hall of mirrors.
William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley is unique among the popular crime fiction of the period. It has its lurid locales, dark character beats, multiple double-crosses, and, of course, a femme fatale. But instead of the traditional gangsters, police, private eyes, or heist-men, the cast of characters features “carnies”, spiritualists, hicks, industrialists, and one psychotherapist. The story is set less in urban environments than it is on the outskirts of interchangeable small towns across the American Midwest and Northeast. The ominous suggestion of this setup is that one need not be embroiled in the intrigues of cops or robbers to have to scramble to survive – or to fall prey to a predator. Gresham’s book, the 1947 film noir adaptation, and the new film adaptation directed by Guillermo del Toro all use the bottom rung of the show business ladder as a stage for cutthroat competition and remorseless manipulation.
Every version of the story follows the same beats. Young Stanton “Stan” Carlisle is far too smart and good-looking to be working as a magician at a carnival sideshow. His company consists of physically different “freaks,” of cheap illusionists like “electric girl” Molly and most ignobly the “geek” – an addict plied with drugs and alcohol to live in degrading conditions and perform a show wherein he bites the heads off chickens. (Such acts were staples of the less reputable carnivals of the era.) In an unsubtle but potent bit of foreshadowing, Stan dreads the fate of the geek, the “end man on the daisy chain,” and he’ll do anything to be the boss, to get more money.
To that end, he seduces and discards a sequence of women. First he ingratiates himself with the carnival’s mentalist, Zeena, swiping the complicated code she developed to look like a genuine psychic. Then he runs off with Molly to begin a new life as a successful spiritualist, swindling a well-off widow out of her house by staging a séance with her dead daughter. He later falls in with psychologist Lilith Ritter, with whom he plans “one last con” targeting auto magnate Ezra Grindle. Naturally, nothing goes according to plan.
Gresham’s novel is a nasty, punchy piece of work, written with unsparing prose and completely unsentimental in its violence. It toys around with its points of view; while mainly written from Stan’s perspective, it occasionally lets the reader inside the heads of characters like Molly, Zeena, or Grindle, illuminating their individual neuroses and giving context to how Stan can manipulate them. It’s a fascinating integration of Freudian psychological frameworks into the pulp paperback world (years later, Robert Bloch’s Psycho would infamously do something similar, even more infamously when Alfred Hitchcock adapted it to film).
The book is equal parts thriller and exposé, pulling down the mystique that had long been built up by freak shows and carnival con artists. With the postwar economy picking up, it would not be long before the suburbanisation of society and the emergence of new entertainment forms like television caused the circus to recede from popular American culture. Gresham’s explanations of how a geek is made, or how mentalists use cold reading on audiences to appear to have supernatural powers, are of a piece with his interest in peeling back the psychology of his characters. They are exposed not just as frauds, but as flawed and desperate individuals.
The first movie adaptation of Nightmare Alley, directed by Edmund Goulding in 1947 and written by the great Jules Furthman, couldn’t hope to be as vicious as the book. Constrained by the censorship standards of the time, it can’t, for instance, openly disclose that the woman Grindle mourns died of an abortion he forced her into. It also can’t let itself end as darkly as the source material. But the film does still manage to be gleefully, aggressively unpleasant within those strictures.
Much of this is down to its use of star Tyrone Power, who plays Stan. He was a squeaky-clean, strong-jawed matinee idol, a distinguished World War II veteran, and beloved by audiences as a swashbuckling action hero. He wanted to get his hands dirty and break his type. To that end, he cajoled 20th Century Fox kingpin Darryl F. Zanuck into buying the rights to Gresham’s book. Power is perfect in the role, his handsome face a mask for Stan’s complete ruthlessness. In no version is he a one-dimensional character; he’s haunted by those he’s hurt, particularly his maybe-accidental/maybe-kind-of-purposeful role in the death of Zeena’s husband. Yet his qualms never once cause him to slow down or stop his scheming. Power is an effectively tortured lead, clenching his pretty teeth through his hatred of the common folk he swindles, which is just as much self-loathing of his own backwater origins as it is contempt for their naiveté. Most disquietingly of all, the movie subtly suggests a continuum between the gawking rubes at a carnival and the eager-to-be-fooled masses in cinemas.
Thanks to Power’s clout, Goulding’s Nightmare Alley had an unusually high budget for a noir production. But audiences did not take to his villainous turn at all, and the movie flopped. In the decades since, its esteem has grown, and it was added to the Criterion Collection in 2021. It’s a keystone piece of the motley of entertainments that use the circus as their setting.
No wonder, then, that del Toro, possibly cinema’s current biggest booster of freaks and monsters, would eye Gresham’s book as the basis for his first project after the wave of acclaim and success he received for 2017’s The Shape of Water. He teamed up with Kim Morgan, an expert in classic film and a well-known noir aficionado, to write the screenplay, but despite this, a handsome budget, a well-pedigreed cast, and essentially no content restrictions of the sort that existed in the ’40s, the newest Nightmare Alley is the least interesting version of this story.
The film is by no means bad; it’s directed with del Toro’s usual keen eye for detail, and full of appreciable character beats. But it’s overlong, and despite its shameless blood and swearing it’s also oddly less hard-edged than its 1947 predecessor. It replaces Gresham’s dime-store Freud with contemporary cinematic one-to-one psychoanalysis, with no piece of motivation or subtext to a character dynamic left for the audience to parse for themselves. The circus, even the freak show, even the geek, all feel too clean; the grime and faded colours seem like stage details.
Bradley Cooper is Stan, doing a capable job of conveying his dogged drive but still missing Power’s charisma. He’s no less of a handsome face, but is at every stage so obviously putting on an act that it’s hard to believe anyone falls for it. This rendition also misses the delicious metatext of Power’s implementation in the 1947 version – originally Leonardo DiCaprio was to play the role, and while he’s also probably too old, some iteration of this made with him in the late ’90s or early ’00s would have been a perfect deployment of his star persona, coming before his purposeful attempts to upset that persona.
One of del Toro’s original contributions is a vision of performers as having a serious responsibility to their audiences. Stan is warned by Zeena and others against going too deep into spiritualism, treating mentalist skills almost like a superpower. Del Toro makes the consequences of this power’s ill use explicit, not just in the con on Grindle but also through a bereaved woman driven to a murder-suicide by Stan’s talk of the hereafter. Despite this dark approach, it’s another detail that makes the film paradoxically more sentimental than its forebears. Unlike Gresham’s book or the 1947 film, this Nightmare Alley lets itself be fooled by the con – at least a little bit.
Nightmare Alley is in UK cinemas now.
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