If the first half of the film does a bit too much explaining about the world of the carnies, the second, set in 1941, bursts into ultra-stylized noir (and art deco splendor). Stan will find his ticket out of the carnival circuit, and with Molly he’ll create a mind-reading act, performed for the upper crust in an elegant Buffalo nightclub. In a quietly wrenching throwaway line, Molly, who has been under the protective eye of Bruno (Ron Perlman), declares her virginity to Stan, but with a devastating asterisk. His ambition is ignited by his attraction to Molly (Rooney Mara), who is as low-key and sincere as her high-voltage act - she’s a human conductor of electricity - is flamboyant.
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He’s focused instead on the book containing the elaborate verbal code Zeena and Pete developed for a mentalist act they no longer perform. Mind-reader Zeena (Toni Collette) shows Stan a very personal welcome, while her dipsomaniac husband, Pete (David Strathairn), warns about the dangers of believing your own lies - words of wisdom that Stan ignores. The barker Clem Hoatley (Dafoe), who has assembled a collection of pickled fetuses, most of them human, that he calls the Unborn Wonders of Nature, shows Stan the carnival ropes. (The original film’s offscreen treatment of these gruesome acts is more powerful than the graphic depiction del Toro provides.) For a quarter, customers can witness sheer human debasement: The hopeless alcoholic who’s been lured into the job, and driven to madness, dutifully bites the head off a live chicken. One of Stan’s first lessons in the carnival involves the geek, whom he confronts in the House of Damnations. The story opens in 1939, when the wounds of the Great War are still festering and another conflagration is on the horizon. But whatever the carnies’ ruses and sleights of hand, it isn’t until Stanton becomes a star in the big city, where he meets an impossibly glamorous psychologist who’s named Lilith Ritter and played by a smooth-as-satin Cate Blanchett, that the real grifting begins.
Not just a quick study but a coolly aggressive one, Stanton rises through the ranks of the low-rent carnival shows, with their lurid come-ons (mind-blowing creatures!) and soul-salving enticements (mind-reading psychics!). His performance takes a while to fully grab hold, no doubt as intended, and when it does, it’s riveting, at once alluring and repellent, holding the center of a superb cast. Screenwriters: Guillermo del Toro, Kim Morgan based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham
But audiences weren’t ready to see their silver-screen swashbuckler in antiheroic mode, an obstacle that Cooper, who has played his share of tarnished types, won’t face.Ĭast: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Richard Jenkins, Toni Collette
Tyrone Power spearheaded that project, determined to leave behind the light adventure fare he was identified with and delve into more complex territory, and he delivered his finest screen performance. His adaptation, with co-writer Kim Morgan, of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley is a more expansive version than the first film iteration of the book, a 1947 black-and-white feature that’s one of the most distinctive noirs ever made. Shifting gears after the Cold War romantic fantasy The Shape of Water, del Toro burrows deep into the margins, both low and high, with his new film. That’s good news for Stan, who’s played by Bradley Cooper with an inscrutable chill, and who has drifted into the carnival after a long bus ride from some things he’d rather forget. “Folks here, they don’t make no never mind who you are or what you done,” Willem Dafoe’s carnival barker assures a newbie, Stanton Carlisle. The first half of Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s blood-dark jewel of an American saga, is set within the itinerant subculture of carnies, at the tail end of the Great Depression.