ANOTHER NIGHTMARE

          A remake of a classic film noir that appeared in 1947, and based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, the new version of Nightmare Alley moves the work from a genre flick to what the publicity on the book covers always calls “a major motion picture,” i. e., an expensive, big time Hollywood production.  In the process, the movie has accumulated a crew of new stars and a lush look that the old black and white production naturally lacked.

          Bradley Cooper plays Stan Carlisle, one of those enigmatic drifters with a murky past right out of 1930s tough-guy fiction (see The Postman Always Rings Twice), who wanders into a traveling carnival.  Looking for any kind of employment, he lands a job helping one of the many scam artists on the midway, gradually learning various tricks and cons, and more or less accidentally discovering his talent for figuring people out, which results in his ascent from worker to “mentalist,” a person who reads minds (assisted, of course, by a comely female sidekick).

He and that sidekick, Molly (Rooney Mara), start a collaboration that leads them—after a considerable jump in time—to performing their act in a classier venue, a nightclub where, dressed in formal wear, he reads the minds of gullible people in the audience.  Stan moves from the sordid world of the carnival and the glittering vulgarity of the nightclub to an even higher game when he encounters a snooty psychologist, Lilith Ritter, played by Cate Blanchett; she helps involve him in a major fleecing of a guilt ridden millionaire seeking to contact his long lost love, whose death he had in effect caused. 

Like all con men, Stan of course aspires to make one big score and retire on the riches, and the millionaire looks like the ticket to his dream.  He delves cleverly into the past, conducts some inspired research, and spends a great deal of time and energy on creating just the right effect to snare his sucker, and with Molly’s reluctant assistance, sets it all in motion.  Of course, we all know how that will turn out.

Unlike the original film, a black-and-white noir classic, this Nightmare Alley features splashy color and a series of stunning art deco interiors.  It employs its title in some inventive ways, showing a variety of alleys, some of them those impressively decorated corridors, that Stanton Carlisle walks, and then runs through in various states of desperation, before he finds himself moving from the linear to the circular in his progress.  Despite the presence of his lover and assistant Molly, Stan’s journey appears bracketed between two blondes, one the blowsy, sexually generous Zeena (Toni Collette), a performer in the dusty, sleazy carnival, who first befriends him and teaches him some of the tricks of her own mentalist racket; the other is the icy psychologist Lilith Ritter, who occupies the astonishing art deco offices and whose name alone should have served to warn him.  In addition she creates a nice balance, in effect plying her own trade as a “mentalist” and thus matching both Zeena and Stan in falsehood and fraudulence.

Collecting quite a bit of critical praise, for whatever that’s worth, the movie certainly stands out from the usual swamp of superhero flicks that would ordinarily draw big crowds in a non-COVID season.  Its fascinating and often unpleasant subtext of cons and scams, of suckers and cheaters, might best be summarized in the title of a W. C. Fields classic, “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man,” a type who, fear not, never appears in Nightmare Alley.  Despite that truth, an admonition implied throughout the work, its dark 1930s ambience, and its bleak ethos, in these difficult times for film companies and movie theaters, it may even make a profit.  Rarely, it may also deserve one.