Notes on Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley

Since I have been posting content about William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley for the last month, it seemed appropriate to end the month by giving some thoughts about the new film version by Guillermo del Toro.

This will not be a full-fledged post like my recent piece on the 1947 film. John Stanifer has done an excellent job describing the differences between the two movies, and there’s very little I can add to his analysis. Instead, here are a few thoughts on the new movie that I jotted down after seeing it for a second time, in mid-January with some friends.

1. If I have a problem with the 1947 film, it’s that I can’t quite believe in Tyrone Powers as a scrappy young man looking for his big break. He gives a great performance, but I find him a little too clever and clean. Bradley Cooper is less eloquent and slowly eases into the charm, which felt more relatable. It probably helped that I knew Cooper had previously played ambitious men whose poor choices leave them grimy (A Star is Born, etc.). That knowledge made it easier for me to believe in him as a con man who loses everything.
2. David Strathairn gives a great performance as alcoholic ex-mentalist Pete. Given that Strathairn was a Ringling Bros clown before he went into acting, I wondered if he had any memories of working with characters like this on the road.
3. While the religious dialogue is more overt in the 1947 film, there is more religious imagery than I remembered from my first viewing. The placement of Saint Christopher medals in several scenes, plus Stan referencing his Bible-based Southern background, add dark comedy as well as a Flannery O’Connor undertone of bizarre judgment. More than a few friends have noted that Gresham’s novel predates O’Connor’s work, but shares her interest in carnivals.
4. I liked the mythical imagery provided by the constant shots of the preserved cyclops baby. One character comments that the baby’s third eye “follows you around, like in portraits.” The way that the camera kept cutting to the baby (sometimes as an intercut scene, sometimes whenever someone enters the carnival tent) suggested that whatever Stan does, someone is watching….
5. John Stanifer noted that this movie doesn’t show much more of the book than the 1947 film. I wondered if that was a deliberate compromise to avoid showing too much of the book’s sexual content. Making an expensive movie with A-list actors about “carnival freaks” was terribly risky in 1947, when the shadow of Todd Browning’s notorious Freaks was still easy to remember. Freaks seems tamer today, but the risk has gotten greater. A movie that showed carney life (including a “geek show” that leaves nothing to the imagination) plus the book’s Freudian sex content and violence might have been have been too much. While I would have liked to have seen more dialogue from Gresham’s book, I appreciated that del Toro didn’t go into all the book’s dark flavors.
6. A friend noted that the psychiatrist Dr. Lilith Ritter is underwritten, and the part doesn’t give Cate Blanchett much to do. I felt it was more that we deliberately get very little, only hints of a dark past and the sense that she’s unreachable. That may make Dr. Lilith Ritter more of a femme fatale cipher than a character. However, Cate Blanchett wasn’t given that much to do as Galadriel in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings either. Both roles involve a few key scenes, minimal backstory, and moments where she seems unsettling as she pierces other character’s defenses. All that to say, even if it’s a thin role, Blanchett gets more out of it than most would.

If you liked these thoughts or want to know about the book, I highly recommend Brenton Dickieson’s recent blog series on Nightmare Alley.