By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
In the shadowy 1930s world of ambitious carnival hucksters, nothing is what it appears to be.
To tell the truth, I first saw the 1947 film adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's novel “Nightmare Alley” in a second-run movie theater back around 1950, and I never recovered. It's tale of the carnival freaks and marginal humans who filled that world has been festering in a dark corner of my brain ever since.
The same can be said of the notably haunted and Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, whose elaborately detailed and psychologically enriched remake of “Nightmare Alley” is dedicated to proving how much he also loved this 1947 film starring Tyrone Power, directed by Edmund Goulding.
Bradley Cooper has the Tyrone Power role now, grungy when we meet him, face frozen in anguish, only melting enough to work up his own carnival con as he learns the quizzical culture of who's in charge of everything under the big tent.
Actually, it's not a very big tent. “Nightmare Alley” begins in a third rate traveling circus of losers and drifters who have fallen through the show business cracks of vaudeville in the 1930s, ending up far below that little man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz.”
This tawdry trail of tuckered out trucks and trailers is both a prison cell and life preserver, an accumulation of misfits and malcontents protected from any demands of the straight world while being chased from small town to small town by irate groups of respectable folk.
Covering up that movie star smile, Cooper seems to fit right in with these itinerant indigents. They recognize in him another empty human. He recognizes in himself a side these posers could nourish for awhile.
Del Toro takes great delight in showing us around this poorly-lit and perpetually greasy community of pretenders while Cooper learns the lingua franca of illusion where nothing is what it seems.
Toni Collette and David Strathairn play Zeena and Pete, lifers in this world, working a combination mentalist-and-fortune-teller act that Pete compiled over the years from the ancient lore of dark arts.
Cooper as Stanton offers to help them. Pete is getting too old to carry his share of the load. Stan chats up Zeena, who spills the secrets of their trade. By the time Stanton has learned enough, he has also charmed the much younger Molly (Rooney Mara) to be his assistant.
Molly's only talent is acting like thousands of volts of electricity are shooting through her body. But before you can say “Holy Moly,” Molly and Stan have bolted this circus for the more well-dressed clientele of Chicago's polite society.
By now, the 150-minute “Nightmare Alley” is half over and becomes a completely different film. Stan has worked up a nightclub act where Molly passes among the tables of wealthy patrons and, using the carny's secret body language, creates the illusion Stan can read the patrons' minds.
That's when Del Toro's acidly articulated world of tent pole tragedy flattens out faster than a country sheriff's raid on the girly dancers' side show. That carnival element of double-edged pain and ecstasy is portrayed so intensely, the proper conversations of people with manners and freshly pressed clothing can't keep up the momentum, even though their black hearts are equally heinous,
Walking out of the theater, remembering how chilling was the 1947 low-budget original, the 2021 remake turns into a museum memory – interesting on the surface, but lacking any heart.
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