A Pool of Primal Fear

The 1947 film “Nightmare Alley” is not as compelling, convincing, or original as William Lindsay Gresham’s novel, a best seller of the previous year, but its own virtues cannot be denied. Considering the material – degradation, adultery, alcoholism, murder, larceny, spiritualism, high-stakes cons, and child abuse, set against the Depression scrim of anarchy, racism, desperation, and top-down corruption – we may marvel that the film was made at all. We may also assume that the film was made 25 years too soon, in an era when the motion-picture code and a nervous studio chief (Daryl Zanuck) mandated a softer focus, a softened protagonist, and, if you don’t look too closely, what passes for a happy ending.Yet had the film been made postcode, it would have lost everything that makes it worthwhile: the almost palpably textured black-and-white shadow play of cameraman Lee Garmes, the blanketing symphonic dissonance of composer Cyril Mockridge, the casual verisimilitude in conveying carny life and high society (on a back lot), the shrewd discretion in portraying the unspeakable, and its masterstroke of counterintuitive casting. Tyrone Power’s performance is the picture’s raison d’etre, for us as it was for the actor himself, who spent all his star power to realize the project. Power had been Fox’s top leading man in the late 1930s and early 1940s, until he was drafted. His only box-office peers at the studio were musical moppet Shirley Temple, language-mangling ice-skater Sonia Henie, and his leading lady in three films, the glorious but too-independent-for-studio-life Alice Faye (during the war, they were all displaced by Betty Grable). None were as pretty as he, a fact he had begun to resent.After the war, Power demanded deeper roles and scored a hit with his first picture in three years, as Maugham’s secular saint in “The Razor’s Edge,” directed by the veteran king of women’s weepies, Edmund Goulding. Zanuck feared moviegoers would not accept Power as the devil – which, at times, Stanton Carlisle in “Nightmare Alley” all but embodies. At one point Zanuck announced that the film would star Mark Stevens and Anne Baxter. But with the reliable Goulding in tow and the skilled screenwriter Jules Furthman, whose stock had been lately restored by a couple of collaborations with Howard Hawks (including the problematical “To Have and Have Not”) on board, Zanuck gave Power and producer George Jessel (he had made money with “The Dolly Sisters”) a green light.The film flopped, and Zanuck did not have to bother with “I told you so” in subsequently assigning Power to vehicles like “Captain From Castile” and “Luck of the Irish.” But Power gave the performance of his life: a 34-year-old with a head of shiny black hair essaying the part of a 21-year-old blond sociopath – a role that retrospectively imparted depth to much of what he did before and after. A better Stanton is hard to imagine. What is more, Power surrounded himself with an ideal cast to share Goulding’s and Garmes’s claustrophobic close-ups: Joan Blondell, Colleen Gray, and Helen Walker as the women who successively hand him his fate, and Ian Keith, who shows it to him reflected in his own face – that of a headliner gone to seed.Gresham frames his novel with a “Death in Venice” conceit. Like Aschenbach, the esteemed historian who shudders at the sight of a decadent old man, rouged and dyed to look young, Carlisle is obsessed with the geek, the lowest attraction in carnival life, who bites the heads off live chickens and snakes to secure a daily bottle. Each novelist has to convince us his hero will fall into a pool of primal fear. Gresham’s carny boss explains to Stan that you don’t find a geek, you make one. Furthman, perhaps forced by censors to avoid laying out the immorality of the film’s more amiable carny folk, settles for Stan’s meditation, “I don’t understand how anybody can get so low,” and an elliptical response from Zeena, a mentalist perfectly embodied by Blondell: “It can happen.” This exchange has a peculiarly Fox-like rhythm: “How can you live without hope?” wide-eyed Betty Grable asks psychopath Laird Cregar in the 1941 “I Wake Up Screaming.” “It can be done,” he says.Gresham knew about falling low and losing hope. Born of an old Baltimore family, he was a roustabout, working at various jobs, devoting himself to serial fixes – a rich wife, communism, philandering, religion, spiritualism, drink. Fascinated by carnival life, he learned the word geek as an epithet for lowlifes and with his novel popularized it as a particular kind of performer, the lowest ever on the scale of paid entertainers. (In the only earlier literary work on geeking, “Keela the Outcast Indian Maiden,” Eudora Welty never used the term.) He wrote an equally bizarre but jumbled novel, “Limbo Tower” (1949), a schematic “Grand Hotel” about frantic misfits confined to the tubercular ward of a hospital, prefiguring “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Cancer Ward.” With its failure, he turned to nonfiction – a biography of Houdini and a lively, personal tour of the “Nightmare Alley” milieu called “Monster Midway.” Suffering from tongue cancer, he checked into a hotel, using the name of the main character in “Limbo Tower,” and took his life in 1962, at 53.The film of “Nightmare Alley” is riveting during the first 48 minutes, when confined to the carnival and a seedy hotel. Stan learns the ropes as a utility man and finds his forte in “cold readings,” convincing the chumps he can see into their pasts. An utter narcissist, Stan readily concedes that he has no concern for other people. But his real failing is that he can’t distinguish between his gift for manipulation in a carny act and in his life. His lovers and co-workers tell him that he can’t con them, but he knows better and is usually right. When he falls prey to a better huckster, he has nothing left.Power lets us see the emptiness and malice behind the pretty facade. As Zeena tells him he can’t have her act because the tarot warns against it, he nuzzles her and says it’s okay with him. She breaks away from a kiss, looking down, insisting she has to think; he pushes her head back to get at her lips, not with his hands, but with his nose and brow, nudging her back like an animal, a gesture you don’t see in golden age movies. Absent a conscience, he is all flashing eyes and self-infatuated grin. Forced to marry the innocent Molly (Gray), he realizes he can get his revenge on the world by working up an act with her, making lemonade out of lemons after all. She avows her love and promises fidelity, but he’s no longer paying attention to her. Grinning giddily at his own future, he turns the famous Power beauty on itself, and the view is fearsome.Power plays one of his best scenes with Ian Keith, Zeena’s rumdum husband, once a headliner, now a drunk. When Stan gives him a badly needed drink, Pete revives his old charm as if out of a hat, and the actor’s own former status as a theatrical matinee idol is a mirror of Power at his peak. One of Goulding’s best moves is an exterior tracking shot, in which we see Stan walk Pete into his tent and emerge from the other side, before turning down the midway, walking toward his fate. But it’s also here the film begins to compromise. Stan gives Pete the wood alcohol that kills him accidentally – not intentionally, as in the novel – and from then on, he is just noble enough to merit deliverance.This in itself is not displeasing: The force of Power’s characterization requires our identification. Nor is the film’s ending an egregious betrayal of the novel. Gresham’s last scene, in which the degenerate Stan, forced to sell himself with a childlike politeness we haven’t seen before, is offered the geek job, is faithfully shot and then some. In the book, we don’t get his response – here, his face distorted by drink, his eyes ringed and droopy, the pupils swimming in soup, he rears back and accepts the offer. The film’s coda, in which he goes on a rampage and discovers that Molly has been hired on to the same carnival and is going to save him, is happy only to the degree that we believe he can take a cure for drink and safely hide out from the industrialist he bamboozled.What is troubling about the last half of the film is the absence of detail that animates the carny scenes. All the great set pieces of the novel – including the house he embezzles and rigs with mentalist contraptions, his ability to outwit a hermetically sealed scale (the most suspenseful and amusing episode in the book), his willingness to prostitute Molly, his railroad encounter with a mysterious black man who is making his way to the very industrialist he set out to fool – are gone, along with the social awareness that gives the novel a multidimensional richness. They are replaced with by-the-numbers scenes hurriedly designed to bring Stan back to where he began.The script improves on the novel in one incident, introducing the shifty psychologist Lilith (played by an ominously still and half-smiling Helen Walker, the thin lines beneath her eyes belying her 28 years) as a skeptical member of Stan’s nightclub audience, rather than the shrink he sees to cure his dreams of running down a nightmare alley. On the other hand, the filmmakers could not resist adding an up-to-date technological wrinkle – a home device for recording transcription discs, which Lilith uses to blackmail Stan. It makes little sense: A disc could not record a 50-minute hour, and it stretches credulity that Stan, who immediately discovers the recording device, almost immediately forgets its existence when he lays down on her couch to tell all.It doesn’t matter much. The fascination of “Nightmare Alley” does not reside in logic but in qualities beyond the powers of a novelist: the expressive chiaroscuro of the lighting – even Lilith’s office is a model of German expressionism, with inexplicable bar-like shadows turning the walls into a cage – and Power’s vanity-free dissection of Stan (note the blackened gums and cockeyed shape of his face in the final scenes). This picture turns conventional Hollywood starlight upside down and inside out. If he hadn’t died so young, Power might have had the chance to tell Zanuck, “I told you so.”Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.

A Pool of Primal Fear

A Pool of Primal Fear

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