The world is open to him without having to say a word. It only takes a few minutes of the film before he has already left his old life behind, found a job as a day laborer and immediately afterwards a permanent position. Certainly, the fair is a pandemonium of shabbiness. But there could also be unlimited possibilities slumbering there.
Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) finds a home among the lost, no longer harboring illusions about human nature but with a robust code of honor; a preliminary one, mind you, because the story takes place in America. The country is still feeling the effects of the Depression. But soon Stanton’s new life wasn’t just pushed into him. He is thirsty for action and wants to make his fortune. When he speaks his first sentence after a full quarter of an hour, it initially serves as an erotic initiation and then leads to a career as a medium. Stanton transforms into a sponge that docilely absorbs all the tricks of cold reading, the fortune-telling technique of feigning knowledge where there is none. He develops a keen sense of how much longing and sadness hides in the people from whom he takes their hard-earned cents and, soon, dollars.
Guillermo del Toro makes imaginative, affectionate films about the monstrous. Now he has the novel The charlatan (1946) adapted by William Lindsey Gresham as a song of infamy. Nightmare Alley is a genre film at its core, but seems more ambitious and weighty. The opulent set (in the second part, Stanton conquers Chicago’s glamorous nightclubs), the top-class cast, even in the supporting roles, and the after The Shape of Water very respectable status of the director make him a veritable Oscar bait. Secretly, it’s a film about the movie business that started out as a fairground amusement and then matured into an exquisite game of attractions to be deciphered. In addition, the film reveals itself as a loving homage to a legacy of Hollywood cinema, the film noir.
Confidently and thoroughly old-fashioned, del Toro and his cinematographer Dan Laustsen reconstruct the impenetrable shadowplay of these pessimistic post-war thriller melodramas beset by failure, despair and guile.
Del Toro erased the element of the paranormal that existed in the novel and the 1947 film adaptation starring Tyrone Power. There, Stanton was still suffering from his gift and sought help from psychiatrist Lilith Ritter. In the remake, their first encounter is a duel of exposure and humiliation, which Stanton appears to win. But in her he will find his master, she is more determined, more sophisticated and simply more intelligent. Cate Blanchett, whose face seems tailor-made for the abysmal chiaroscuro of film noir, plays her as a classic femme fatale, but gives her an unprecedented ambiguity. One of the foundations of this narrative terrain was always that the opponents acted as mirror images. It is noteworthy how in Nightmare Alley Psychiatry becomes the flip side of the fairground swindle.
While Gresham was writing his novel, Hitchcock’s was coming Spellbound out, which forms the prelude to the romance between Hollywood and Freudianism. Hitchcock stages the analysis as a search process, as a therapeutic chase. Del Toro uses her symbolic language, but at the same time disenchants her: as a quintessentially American “con game” that trusts that people not only want to be seen, but read.
Nightmare Alley William of the Bull USA 2021, 150 Minutes