The novel\u2019s backstory itself is gloomy, intersecting as it does with the midcentury disillusionment of the American Left. In the midst of the Depression, Gresham worked as a folk singer in Greenwich Village, joined the Communist Party and enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a \u201cpremature\u201d anti-fascist, as he would be tarred by postwar Red-baiters. In Spain, one of Gresham\u2019s fellow soldiers was an ex-carny who regaled him with sordid tales of carnival life, revealing the secrets behind various \u2018magic\u2019 tricks and the sideshow attractions known as \u201cgeeks\u201d\u2014carnies intentionally \u201cmade\u201d into desperate alcoholics and, in turn, into raving \u2018freaks\u2019 suffering delirium tremens, willing to bite off the heads of live chickens, for payment in booze. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Gresham returned stateside, he himself devolved into alcoholism and a suicide attempt (his second was successful in 1962) before finding (temporary) solace in psychoanalysis and in crafting all that carny material\u2014and his cynicism about the American Way\u2014into Nightmare <\/em>Alley, in which sleights-of-hand-as-popular-entertainment escalate into ever more lucrative levels of deception and human degradation, climbing out of rural carnival grounds into the Big City and Big Money. Apparently, Gresham\u2019s dark outlook touched a nerve, joining 1946\u2019s bestseller lists alongside Frederick Wakeman\u2019s The Hucksters <\/em>and Robert Penn Warren\u2019s All the King\u2019s Men, <\/em>themselves darkly cynical about fraud (and the public\u2019s gullibility) in American advertising and politics, respectively.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unafraid of a little controversy or sordidness (in fact, attuned to their box office potential), 20th<\/sup> Century Fox\u2019s head Darryl F. Zanuck snatched up the film rights to Gresham\u2019s novel, assigned veteran scenarist Jules Furthman and veteran director Edmund Goulding to the project, and conceded to Tyrone Power\u2019s insistence on being cast, against his romantic hero type. For Power, the role of Stan represented a chance to prove he was more than just a pretty-faced matinee idol. For the part, <\/em>Power is made ugly\u2014a line that might also describe one of classic noir\u2019s defining characteristics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tyrone Power makes the most of the opportunity. His Stan, around whose charisma the film revolves, is complex: a good-natured and sensitive empath (which serves him well as a pretend psychic) marred by a fatal flaw\u2014self-centered ambition\u2014about which he marvels, as if an outside observer. \u201cI wonder why I\u2019m like that,\u201d he muses. Early on, as a new carnival barker, he describes the perverse pleasure he derives from duping the people, which allows him to feel \u201csuperior\u201d to the \u201cyokels.\u201d \u201cI was made for it,\u201d he enthuses. (Keep your ears open for this line\u2019s echo towards the end). Inexorably driven, Stan will scrape his way to fame and fortune, becoming \u201cStanton the Great,\u201d a \u201cmentalist\u201d who performs before the doyens of Chicago\u2019s high society. But this is noir, and so we know this will not be a great American success story, not a tale of progress but devolution. The dead end is predetermined in the (otherwise nonsensical) title and in the Tarot readings that literalize noir\u2019s fatalism. Stan is foredoomed for the geek pit, destined to fall for reaching too high, as the film\u2019s last line of dialogue moralizes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s how it happens: we first meet Stan watching the geek sideshow. (The film viewer, however, will be denied a good look at The Geek, given the debacle of MGM\u2019s Freaks <\/em>(1932) and subsequent prohibitions against \u201cgruesomeness\u201d written into the Production Code, about which much ink has been spilled.) \u201cThat guy fascinates me,\u201d Stan explains to the carnival boss, asking, \u201cHow do you get a guy to be a geek?[…] [I]s a guy born that way?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n But there\u2019s no time to dwell on this loaded question. Stan must rouse the passed-out drunk Pete (Ian Keith) for their act with Pete\u2019s wife Zeena (a mature Joan Blondell), a \u201cseeress\u201d who pretends to read minds, with Pete and Stan\u2019s help and a nifty little stage trick. That\u2019s nothing, carny-babe Molly (a dewy-faced and scantily-clad Colleen Gray) explains to Stan. Pete and Zeena once had an even better act, using a \u201ctwo-person code\u201d (\u201cworth its weight in gold\u201d)\u2014a system for communicating audience members\u2019 written questions through word choice and intonation. But that was before Pete became a \u201crum dumb,\u201d halfway to geekdom, a cautionary tale that Stan ignores at his peril. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To get \u2018The Code,\u2019 Stan seduces Zeena and accidentally kills Pete, taking pity on his DTs and pleas, unknowingly handing him a bottle of Zeena\u2019s prop alcohol\u2014a mistake that haunts Stan with guilt even as he sets out to profit from it. Replacing Pete as Zeena\u2019s partner, Stan masters The Code, wowing carnival crowds and Molly, who he charms into premarital sex, not so subtly implied. Zeena certainly catches on, forcing Stan to legitimize the consummation with marriage, albeit after the fact. Ever scrappy, Stan plays the forced union to his advantage, grooming his young bride as his new stage partner. Trading his striped blazer for a tux and her sequins leotard for a ballgown, they bring their act to Chicago\u2019s swankiest nightclub, complementing The Code with Stan\u2019s uncanny ability for \u201cstock readings,\u201d a trick that that undercuts (American) Individualism, which only blinds people to their own (predictable) commonality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One fateful night, Stan and Molly\u2019s audience contains Dr. Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), a brilliant and beautiful psychologist who easily deciphers The Code for two older gentlemen at her table. This is our first clue that Dr. Ritter is Nightmare Alley\u2019s <\/em>femme fatale, notwithstanding the film poster\u2019s triangulation of that role. Tellingly, Stan is blindfolded as their power play begins that night. He is a \u201cseer\u201d who doesn\u2019t see, a mind-reader who misreads a superior mind-reader–in a notable conflation of phony mentalism with professional psychotherapy, then gaining traction in postwar America. Also conflated is female professionalism with emasculation. When Stan visits Dr. Ritter\u2019s office, and then her apartment, he finds her in power suits and himself in striated shadows, noir\u2019s preferred signifiers of the spider woman. She out-talks him and commands the frame. (For viewers who wonder why the scene-stealing Walker wasn\u2019t a bigger star, the answer lies in a tragic car accident\u2014with Walker at the wheel\u2014involving booze and hitchhiking war veterans; one died and the others sued, successful in the court of public opinion if not the court of law. Unfolding during Nightmare Alley<\/em>\u2019s anemic first run, Walker\u2019s tragic fate is one of the reasons the film was considered cursed.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is Dr. Ritter who suggests the darker scheme that will ruin Stan: using the personal details gathered (and recorded) in her clients\u2019 sessions to fleece them in the nightclub, convincing them of Stan\u2019s powers, now enlarged to include communion with their dearly departed. Dr. Ritter draws our Icarus nearer the sun, until a final s\u00e9ance goes disastrously wrong. The jig is up but Stan alone will take the fall, because Dr. Ritter has outwitted him. The scene of her icily clinical diagnosis of his delusional order is worth the price of admission alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n All that\u2019s left then is the rapid downward spiral into alcoholism and the geek pit. Stan returns to the carnival, desperate for a job and stinking of beer, both of which the carnival boss sniffs. In the film\u2019s final moments, renowned cinematographer Lee Garmes enjoys one last chance to show off in the carnival grounds, with marvelous crane shots and roaming spotlights. Stan-as-geek veers madly at midnight past cages, carousels, and ferris wheels, running into Molly\u2019s arms (in a lame Zanuck insert meant to soften noir\u2019s and the source novel\u2019s sting) and, ultimately, into the more believably bleak moral about hubris, aforementioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On December 17, when Del Toro releases his version of Gresham\u2019s novel in theaters, will he pull off this cinematic s\u00e9ance? Will his gifted showman\u2019s ambition pay off or go down in flames? I, for one, can\u2019t wait to see.\u00a0 “Nightmare Alley” is now streaming<\/a> on the Criterion Channel.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/nightmare-alley-1024x744.png\")
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