“How do you get a guy to be a geek?” marvels Tyrone Power as a recently hired carnival magician to his thuggish boss in 1947 cult noir Nightmare Alley, screening this week in 35-millimeter as part of the Music Box’s Noir City series. “I mean, is a guy born that way?”
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In broad outline, the film is faithful to its source. Power stars as conjurer Stan Carlisle, who, when not performing or pondering the geek, makes time with fellow performer Zeena (Joan Blondell), an older, married mentalist who once trod the boards of big-time vaudeville with her husband, Pete (Ian Keith), now a hopeless drunk. To get Pete out of the way one evening, Stan provides him with a stolen bottle of the booze that Zeena is desperately trying to keep away from him. The plan works too well: the purloined liquor turns out to be wood alcohol, and Pete dies.
Capitalizing on the situation, Stan replaces Pete as Zeena’s assistant and coaxes her into teaching him the verbal code that underwrote her and Pete’s vaudeville mind-reading act. He then takes up with the gorgeous young Molly (a stunningly nubile Coleen Gray), whose act consists of cheating death while perched semi-clad in a bogus electric chair. Stan and Molly leave the carnival and go into the “spook racket,” misrepresenting their staged mind-reading feats as the fruits of real psychic powers. Stan’s master plan is to insinuate himself into high society and use mediumistic trickery to mulct wealthy suckers of some real money. His ambitions are raised yet another notch when he falls in with Dr. Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), an upscale shrink willing to betray her patients’ darkest secrets to Stan for a piece of the action.
Ultimately the shortcomings of the film vis-a-vis the book relate to the length and depth of the shadow cast by the geek. In the film, he’s a bit of Grand Guignol, adding atmosphere to a picaresque but unrelated crime tale, but for Gresham’s amoral and deteriorating protagonist, he becomes the key to understanding “all human nature.” Studying Pete’s notes on the mentalist’s craft, Stan imbibes the lesson that fear is the dominant emotion, and addiction the prevailing response: “The geek was made by fear. He was afraid of getting sober and getting the horrors. But what made him a drunk? Fear. . . . The geek has his whiskey. The rest of them drink something else: they drink promises. They drink hope. And I’ve got it to hand them.”
