Nightmare Alley

Year 15, Day 89 - 3/30/23 - Movie #4,390

BEFORE: Tim Blake Nelson carries over again from "Old Henry", and I fear I miscounted the number of days until Mother's Day - I was thinking it's on May 9 this year, but I must have got the date confused with Easter, which is on April 9.  Mother's Day will be on May 14, so my chain is now FIVE days off - fortunately, I programmed three Mother-themed films in a row, so the simplest solution is to just take two days off, and make a different film land on Mother's Day.  However, this could throw a monkey wrench into my Memorial Day plans.  OK, I had two military-themed films planned, a few days apart.  I can fix this, just give me a little time - once I get through Easter and my documentary chain, I'll make the appropriate adjustments.  Thankfully this is easily fixed by taking a small break, if I was off in the other direction I'd have to start cutting movies. 

It's Day 30 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Military Life" (before 8 pm) and "Melodrama" (8 pm and after.) Here's the line-up: 

6:00 am "Here Comes the Navy" (1934)

7:30 am "The Sky's the Limit" (1943)

9:00 am "The Americanization of Emily" (1964)

11:00 am "Mister Roberts" (1955)

1:15 pm "Hollywood Canteen" (1944)

3:30 pm "Anchors Aweigh" (1945)

6:00 pm "On the Town" (1949)

8:00 pm "Magnificent Obsession" (1954)

10:00 pm "Imitation of Life" (1959)

12:15 am "Peyton Place" (1957)

3:00 am "Dark Victory" (1939)

5:00 am "Stella Dallas" (1937)

I've seen five of these - "Mister Roberts", "Anchors Aweigh", "On the Town", "Dark Victory" and "Stella Dallas".  Another 5 seen out of 12 takes me to 153 seen out of 341, down just a bit to 44.8%, with just one day left I've got no hope of reaching 50% again. 

THE PLOT: A grifter working his way up from low-ranking carnival worker to lauded psychic medium matches wits with a psychologist intent on exposing him. 

AFTER: Oh, I was so hot for this film in late 2021, I was desperate to see it and program it into the horror chain, it connected with SO many other films with its large and stellar cast, surely I'd find a place for it and build a chain around it - I recorded it on my DVR in April 2022, knowing that it could be centerpiece come October. But it didn't win Best Picture, though it was nominated, the attraction kind of cooled off a little bit, and then when October rolled around, it turned out the best horror chain that I could put together didn't connect with "Nightmare Alley" at all, so I tabled it.  But a quick peek at the storyline revealed that it didn't have much of a horror angle to it at all, no more than "Blithe Spirit" did, in fact del Toro's "Pinocchio" has more of a horror angle to it, because at least Pinocchio "dies" a few times and comes back from the underworld.  

So now I'm a bit desperate to get rid of it, it's two and a half hours long and taking up valuable real estate on my movie DVR.  So in a weird twist, "Pinocchio" became the more urgent film to get to, and since this film shares three actors with that animated feature, it's a good opportunity to cross it off.  I think a lot of people may have lost the attraction to this one, since it's no longer on HBO Max, and some other films have stayed on that platform much, much longer.  It's no "Pinocchio", that's for sure, it's not even up there with "The Shape of Water", so one has to wonder if the Academy was just remembering how good THAT film was when they nominated this one. 

The first third of the film is set in a carnival, and what we know about carnivals is how good they are at separating people from their money.  (What is a film director if not a glorified carnival barker, asking people to "step right up" and come inside and see the wonders of this movie or that, but then once the tickets are bought, what's the motivation to provide the thrills that were promised?). The freak show at the carnival was once the place that would hire the people with handicaps or abnormalities or weird talents, but also the home of tricksters and grifters and mentalists, a strange combination of magic and showmanship.  But we adults know that there's no such thing as magic, there's just tricks and illusion.  

We get the word "geek" from carny culture, ("nerd" came from the Dr. Seuss book "If I Ran the Zoo") but a geek used to be a performer at the carnival who would be kept in a pit and pretend to be a wild savage that would bite the heads off of chickens to gross out the rubes. And the novelty song "Pencil-Necked Geek" from the mid 1970's solidified it as an insult, but over time it got turned around to define someone who was socially awkward or overly intellectual, or obsessed with a particular hobby or intellectual pursuit.  Counter-culture reclaimed the word, so it's no longer always a negative term, yet still "Geeks" was paired with "Freaks" in a popular sitcom. But this film focuses on the chicken thing - and describes how the carny bosses would find broken people, ply them with alcohol and trick them into service as geeks, then discard them when they were sick or no longer useful.  

Maybe it's me, but the carnival here seems to be a metaphor for any form of employment, if you wanted to sign up for employment then it was a simple, universal path to success - make yourself available, make yourself useful, and then, with luck, make yourself indispensable.  But realize that if you're no longer useful, or there's no longer a need for your services, then the job goes away, and you're stuck in whatever town the last carnival played in, and you'll have to make the best of it.  And then there were others who signed up because they needed to disappear from society, at least for a while - either way, it's a tough life and there are no free rides. I've got a co-worker now who's worked at a few Renaissance Faires, and I confirmed that there is still a circuit out there, if someone were inclined to drop out of society, go out on the road and live a nomadic lifestyle, there's enough work out there for this to be possible.

The film centers on Stanford Carlisle, a drifter who gets a temp job at a carnival, but since they're short-handed it leads to a job offer, with transportation to the next town -  and later we learn why Stan needed to get out of town. (Sure, they're checking the bus and train stations, but nobody's checking the carnival trucks...). That carnival closes down, but the acts migrate to another one, where he meets a clairvoyant, Madame Zeena, and replaces her alcoholic husband Pete as her assistant, then later replaces him as her lover. But Stan learns the tricks of the mentalism trade, from coded language to cold readings.  But Zeena warns him about doing the "spook show", as in pretending to communicate with the dead to trick people.  Meanwhile, Stan becomes attracted to another carnival performer, Molly, and eventually convinces her to run away with him to stage a two-person headlining act somewhere else, based on the techniques he learned from Zeena and Pete. 

In the second act of the film, Stan and Molly are headliners in Buffalo, doing their mentalism routine on stage instead of at a carnival - Stan gets involved with a beautiful psychologist, Dr. Lilith Ritter, who tries to expose him as a fraud, but they end up working together to defraud wealthy people using the cold reading techniques, and we realize that analysis uses some of the same principles, to learn about a person's backstory and then figure them out, it just has a different goal of self-actualization, rather than grift.  But hey, analysts still get paid, so maybe they're not so different after all. Ritter's got the connections to Buffalo's rich and messed-up people, and Stan has the "ability" to talk to their dead relatives, so it seems like another perfect con.  

But in Act 3 Stan goes too far, he ignores Zeena's warnings to not do the "spook show", and sets out to bilk Ezra Grindle, a former patient of Ritter's, a man who forced a woman to have an abortion years ago, and has felt guilty ever since, because it led to her death.  Stan does his background research and realizes the dead woman looked a bit like Molly, so he ropes his own girlfriend into the scheme and tells Grindle he can make her spirit "materialize" if he repents, and gives him a large sum of money, of course.  But things go south, and once again Stan is forced to leave town in a hurry - oh, if only there were a place he could go and hide where nobody looks for society's discarded people!

I predicted the ending because the film did such an obvious job of foreshadowing it in the first act - I felt there had to be some form of poetic justice for the lead character because he was SUCH a terrible person, and I was right about his fate.  I don't know if that's just because I've had so much practice at this, or because it was so blatantly telegraphed, perhaps a combination of the two. 

The whole carnival setting reminds me of a notable joke about the guy who complains to a drinking buddy about his job at the circus, twelve hours a day tending to the elephants, feeding the elephants, cleaning up elephant poop, over and over, to the point where he's exhausted and comes home smelling like elephant poop, so his friend suggests that he come work for him, in a clean office, just 8 hours a day, and he wouldn't have to clean up poop any more, but the man responds, "What? And give up show business?"  I thought about this joke a lot when I was sweeping up movie theaters in the summer of 2021, and I still think about it now when my job at the animation studio drives me completely crazy. 

Jeez, I got really worried, because Tim Blake Nelson didn't show up until the last scene in the film, and I was convinced that I missed him somehow.  I was afraid that maybe I dozed off for a few scenes early on and missed him, and I was going to have to go back and find him just to make sure my linking was still intact. And I guess we'll find out in October, if I'm somehow unable to put a coherent chain of films together, whether I should have saved this film for that month...

Also starring Bradley Cooper (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Cate Blanchett (last heard in "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio"), Ron Perlman (ditto), Toni Collette (last seen in "The Pallbearer"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The Fault in Our Stars"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Rooney Mara (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Mary Steenburgen (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), David Strathairn (last seen in "Fast Color"), Mark Povinelli (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Peter MacNeill (last seen in "Open Range"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "The Ice Road"), Paul Anderson (last seen in "Robin Hood" (2018)), Lara Jean Chorostecki, Jim Beaver (last seen in "Crimson Peak"), Clifton Collins Jr. (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), David Hewlett (last seen in "Midway"), Sarah Mennell, Mike Hill, Dian Bachar, Troy James (last seen in "Hellboy" (2019)), Matthew MacCallum, Samantha Rhodes, Jesse Buck, Linden Porco.

RATING: 6 out of 10 tarot cards