Nightmare Alley (2021)

The Smartest Man in the Room

or

"...It's All Geek To Me"

 

We meet Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) in the middle of committing a crime; in a soon-to-be-abandoned house, he drags a body to a waiting hole in the floor-boards, strikes a match—we see a gas-can on the floor behind him—and sets the room and the clapboard structure on fire. Then he simply walks away, next stop...anywhere, U.S.A.

 

It's a bus-ride to where he's going. And he gets off at the designated restaurant, but he moves on to the glowing lights of a carnival, drawn to it like a moth to a flame. He moves over to a structure blanketed with "'Odd'-i-torium" and he goes in; for a quarter, he can see "The Geek" described by carny boss Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe) as a "supreme oddity—is he man of beast?" And as the slack-jawed crowd of curious gawkers gathers around a small arena, "The Geek," mangy and disheveled, is let out of his cage and thrown a live chicken which he bites in the neck and tears its head off. Repulsed, Stan leaves but is followed by Hoatley: "What's your pitch, pal? You on the low?" 

Within ten minutes Carlisle is hired as a roustabout, and one of his jobs is to round up the geek when he escapes his cage. Stan is sent in through the demonically-themed fun-house, it's signs warning of damnation and sees the geek, cowering. Ignoring Hoatley's advice, he tries to entice the man on his own and ends up getting concussed by a brick. Before any more damage can be done, he's found, the geek trussed up and Hoatley, fearing repercussions, offers him a steady job with the carnival. At night, he dreams dreams of flames, but in the morning, he helps fold up the tent and move on with the show—they're meeting up with another troupe down the road.

The spot they stop is a lot with an already-established carnival and across the dirt road is the house of Madame Zeena (Toni Collette) and her husband, Pete (David Strathairn), a once very successful mentalist act, gone on to hard times because of Zeena's philandering and Pete taking to drink. There is still talent in the older gentleman, but his will is broken, but he sees talent in the young man who's come to the house with the newly-arrived vagandonds and wants a bath. Zeena sees something in him, too, and seduces him—not that it takes much—and reads his fortune with her Tarot cards and it's ominous. Carlisle doesn't believe in such nonsense, not believing in fate, but only in the weakness he notices in others. He thinks he'll do very well.

If you've seen the 1947 version, you'll recognize a lot of what's going on as gone before. Watching this version of Nightmare Alley, though, evokes the same feeling one had when watching Martin Scorsese's version of Cape Fear after having seen the original.  It's the same story, but in another location, one steeped in the obsessions of the director. Where the first story was done to get the material down, the new one is richer, more grandiose, and more nuanced. No one's worried about time or hurrying the scene along. There is so much detail that to have it go any faster would be to miss something. The screenplay—by director Guillermo del Toro and his wife Kim Morgan—author of the "Sunset Gun" blog—is based on the original novel by William Lindsay Gresham, not on the original's screenplay by Howard Hawks scribe Jules Furthman. As such, it's a bit more "on the nose" and spells things out, announcing its themes and intentions so that no one misses the point. Rather than hurting the movie, it only gives it more depth, as the story can take the weight.

The casting is top-notch in the way the original couldn't be—there everyone was attractive—and populated by character actors of great depth. Cooper is Tyrone Power handsome, but he has a boyish "something" that makes him attractive—a kid in a man's body. Rooney Mara plays Molly, who is far more waif-like, but still evokes an inner strength and del Toro veteran Ron Perlman plays her guardian, Bruno, the carnival strong-man. Collette and Strathairn are both studies in washed-up talent, resigned to their fates but capable of showing glimpses of their glory days, and as Dr. Lilith Ritter, a fellow con artist as psychiatrist, Cate Blanchett risks parody by playing a creature of constantly challenging seduction, as if Lauren Bacall was playing a villain. 

This is something of a first for del Toro, who leaves behind the monsters' realm (temporarily, I assume), even while keeping one separated foot planted firmly in the grotesque. It's not his usual genre, as it's not a horror movie (and hewing closer to noir), but it flirts with it, the way that Carlisle will flirt with the mystical and the spiritual when he thinks using mentalist tricks isn't enough of a high-stakes racket for him. Because it's not enough to play tricks on people, to "read" them and use it against them, convince them that you have a power that they don't have. It's an endlessly escalating mind-game for both players. But, the hubris that results can make the fall from great heights higher than it appears. 

And Carlisle is just a beginner. He's not a mind-reader. He's a weakness-reader. A need-reader. It would have been better if he'd learned the tarot, so he could learn the future, but even when he's told what it is, even when it's spelled out in so much detail, he doesn't believe it. And maybe that has something to do with control. The future isn't written; he has no way to sway it. No way to read it, like the past on a man's face. And he's as much a paying customer—a rube—as anybody else is when it comes to Fate.

And that just doesn't cut it for the smartest man in the room, the man who knows everything about everybody. 

 

Except himself. Except that he's not as smart as he thinks he is.

 

It's a cautionary tale, as so much of film noir is. And it's one people should listen to.

 

Time After Time (1979)

Time After Time (Nicholas Meyer, 1979) He really wanted to direct. 

Nicholas Meyer enjoyed a couple of best-selling books—one of them, "The Seven Percent Solution", had been made into a film for which he supplied the screenplay—and dabbled in screen-writing—he wrote the script for "The Night That Panicked America" about Orson Welles' Hallowe'en broadcast of "The War of the Worlds." But, directing...that was a tough job to get even if you were a lauded writer, screen-writer, and proved you could crack the public's consuming zeitgeist. I mean, who d'you think you are...John Huston?

Meyer had been given fifty-five pages of a novel that a friend was writing and wanted Meyer's opinion—seeing potential in it, he optioned the story which featured 19th century author H.G. Wells going into the future via time machine to pursue Jack the Ripper into the 20th Century. Meyer took that nugget of story, wrote a screenplay and sold it to Orion Pictures with the caveat that he was to direct.

Meyer's "time" had come.

H. G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) is upset about the current times of 1893. He holds a dinner party for some friends (are you getting a sense of deja vu yet?) to show them his recent invention—a time machine, which he intends to use to seek out his vision of "Utopia" by using the device to travel into the future. But, his device isn't so fanciful as the one in his novel; it has a couple of safety features of his own devising to prevent such accidents as might happen when traveling through time...and should one mis-lay their time machine in their travels.

His little dinner party is interrupted, however, by the police who are investigating the Whitechapel murders and its perpetrator, known as "Jack the Ripper." A search is made of Wells' house and two things are discovered: a doctor's bag containing bloody gloves that belong's to Wells' guest, the surgeon John Leslie Stevenson (David Warner); Stevenson has gone missing, and with him Wells' time machine. "Jack" has escaped into the future, and Wells, with no machine, cannot pursue him.*

Ah, but those safety devices that might prevent the time machine from being used by "Morlocks" or something—here's where they come in handy. One of them is a key, or, more specifically, a "non-return key" that, as long as it's in the machine, keeps it in the designated time. Stevenson, not having it, is left in the future as Wells' machine travels back to its original time after a certain period. Pretty handy, that. As is the second device a "vaporizing equalizer," another key, which prevents the traveler from journeying through time without the device.

Wells' time machine returns like a well-fed dog and he ascertains that Stevenson has traveled into the future, specifically November 5th, 1979 and, with keys well in place, he takes the journey in his machine—a safe bet, after all, as it seems to have worked for Stevenson. Wells makes it, finding himself still in his time machine, but which seems to have made its way to 1979 San Francisco (explained because the machine—at the time—is loaned to an S.F. museum for an exhibition on H.G. Wells). Wells starts to become acquainted with 20th century customs like fast fried food, aeroplanes, television, the vagaries of fashion, and "fish-out-of-water" tropes in movies. 

But, he's after Stevenson and his first bit of detective work is to divine where a man of his century would go to exchange money of the 19th century for that of the 20th. There, he meets Bank of London employee Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen)—who seems to be getting more of these requests than she's ever seen in her employ. She directs him to where the previous gent asking about the exchange rate for old currency is currently keeping himself.

Wells finds Stevenson and he seems to be adapting quite well to the new age. All Stevenson has to do is turn on his hotel room television and show Wells the carnage going on in the world, telling him "Ninety years ago, I was a freak. Now, I'm an amateur." Wells insists that Stevenson return to their time and face justice, but Stevenson will have none of it, trying to get the "non-return key" from Wells, and, in a struggle that spills out of the hotel and into the streets, Stevenson gets hit by a car. Wells, thinking Stevenson is dead, stops his pursuit.

But, Wells knows nothing of cars or of modern hospitals...or of the implacability of his quarry. Stevenson is quite alive...and up to his old ways. And one of his intended victims is Amy, whom he has rightly deduced led Wells to him. And as Amy and Wells have developed a budding relationship, the stakes become very personal...especially after a short jaunt to prove the viability of his time machine has shown her that (via a future newspaper headline) that she will become one of the Ripper's victims in three days' time.

It seems strange that one could make a charming romance out of a story using one of the most infamous of serial killers, but Meyer's Time After Time manages to do it. That has less to do with the Jack the Ripper plot, but more with the way Meyers makes a romance between McDowell's Wells—who thinks he's ever so sophisticated for a man of his time—and McDowell's Amy—who's decades ahead of his Victorian thinking and is more than casual about it. Meyers has fun with it—he loved taking the Star Trek crew out of their element in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home—and his dexterity keeping the Wells-Robbins scenes frothy are the parts that will delight someone seeing this film for the first time.

It's Meyer's first film directing, but the film has the flair of a much more accomplished director, partly because Meyer seems to have taken his direction from more classic films—it just seems to have the edge of a Billy Wilder, while also retaining his romantic quality. Part of that might be the atmosphere provided by Miklós Rósza, who provides the sort of sophisticated, ardent film score that he had previously produced for Hitchcock...and Wilder and brings the sense of a by-gone era that fits well bridging both the 19th and 20th centuries.

It's a good, literate little film that provides the thrills and wonder of its earlier inspiration—Wells' novel and the George Pal film made of it—while also bringing something new to the party, this time around.

* "Sure, he could," you say. "All he has to do is build another time machine and go" (In this instance, time does wait...) Yes, I counter, he can build it, but to go where—or more correctly, when? He doesn't know where Stevenson/Jack has gone—into the anonymous past or into the unknowable future. So, Meyer's little safety devices are necessary...or else we'd have no movie at all.