Nightmare Alley *****

Horror movies today just aren't scary. And this is why. If you go out for a night at the movies, go home and have a nightmare that the doll in the corner of your room could pick up a knife and chase you around the house, you're an idiot.

If you come out of the theater and look at your car twice because you're not sure whether or not it's going to come to life, P.T. Barnum would like to have a word with you. When you go camping, and can't sleep because you're not sure whether or not a man in a hockey mask that you've never met is going to come after you, there's a sale on the Brooklyn Bridge. If you have done any of the above three things, I guarantee you have watched one of those informertials about how any moron could make a million with this revolutionary real estate program and made a phone call. Why not? Plus, if you call by the end of the show, there's a 10 percent discount for you.

I shouldn't indict people today for this because we had our share of beauts back in the day (Frankenstein vs. the Wolfman, anyone?). Stupid people are eternal as are hustlers to make money off them. Why make honest money though effort when you can dupe the masses?
True fear for functioning minds lives in realism. I still insist that the final frame of M is the scariest in the history of film, especially if you have children. Horror exists in this world. The movies that deal with this are the ones that should keep you up at night.

Nightmare Alley was listed as a melodrama, but that's not accurate. It's a horror movie, and an effective one at that because it deals with the ultimate nightmare - the worst case scenerio. The worst case scenerio in Nightmare Alley is the show business boogey man. That creature which exists in ghost stories that we tell each other by the jukebox light. The geek. Children today use the phrase in the playground as an insult without knowing it's true meaning. Oh, the geek existed. Today, it would be a metaphor for using people at their weakest for profit because the geek is no more.

At least I hope it's not. I thought it wasn't in 1947 after Nightmare Alley came out, but Tyrone Power set me straight. Ty was the star of the movie and while we were having a drink, I asked about the use of the geek as a metaphor in the film.

"Metaphor?," Power said while grinning that sardonic grin he used so effectly in the movie. "Oh, make no mistake, you can still find a geek."

What? I didn't believe him. Couldn't be. Power offered to show me. I wasn't sure I wanted to actually see this, but he insisted. Power was still a little mad at me over an incident that occured earlier in the evening when I had a little too much amazement in my voice while telling him how great he was in Nightmare Alley. It was an award-winning effort, but let's not fool ourselves, no one ever confused Ty with Lawrence Olivier.

Nonetheless, we picked up a cab and head to the Valley where Power knows of a floating carnival in the area. He wasn't lying. We walked over to the sideshow part of the carnival in the front and there was the sign advertising the geek. I refused to pay money for this, so Ty paid. Slowly creeping in, I saw the pit and inched my head over the threshold like one looking over the edge of a cliff. And there it was. I refuse to address what I saw with human pronouns. It had long greasy hair, was missing teeth, reeked of moonshine, but the look in its eyes had nothing to do with moonshine; other substances were involved. The creature was wearing shorts and a blood-stained white t-shirt. The geek had one job and one job alone; it bit the heads off of live chickens.

Most performers wont work at a carnival with a geek because by the grace of God go thee. I call these creatures it, but they weren't always an it. They were once a him or her that made mistakes. Bad mistakes. And with people being people, they're happy to pay and collect money to watch this pain. There's where the horror lies.

Nightmare Alley is the story of how a him turns into an it and the finished product deprived me of sleep for years.

The movie starts with Tyrone Power (playing carny hand Stanton Carlyle) asking the carnival director how someone could become a geek. Or why? These are questions you don't ask. It's a sensitive topic since the morality and legality of the act is beyond debate as the always great Joan Blondell (as mentalist Zeena) tells him just that.

Stanton is Zeena's assistant. Her act involved getting questions from the audience that she answers without actually looking at the written queries. This is accomplished by giving the question to another assistant, a rummy called Pete, that signals her from under the stage. After the show, Power discovers that this isn't always the way the act went. Once Zeena and Pete used a code system that made them quite successful before Pete fell off the wagon.

The code is an old trick. It goes something like this. Blindfold the mentalist and have the assistant go into the audience. Say she holds up an earring from a volunteer and asks the mentalist, "What am I holding here?" Here, hear, ear, earring. That's how it works. From what Zeena says here, their code is much more involved with words representing numbers and cadence changing meanings.

While Zeena, Pete and Stanton are driving between shows, Stanton inquires about the code. Zeena tells him that they have been offered a lot of money for it, but it's their nest egg. She won't give up on Pete because he's in his condition because of her. She "has the heart of a artechoke, a leaf for everyone" (a great subtle line in a great subtle screenplay by the underrated Jules Furthman).

Zeena considers using the code in the act, but after looking at her Tarot cards, she discovers that while the future looks great for Stanton and herself, Pete drew the death card.
Stanton disregards this nonsense until Pete begging for booze one night sets an unfortunate series of events in motion. Stanton hid his quart of moonshine in Zeena's clothes trunk. After hearing Pete's sob story and listening to him tell lucid and entertaining stories of the old days, Stanton breaks down and give him his clear unlabeled bottle. Stanton's motive for giving Pete the bottle at first is unclear and that's thanks to Power's marvelously nuanced performance. In this movie, everything lives in the noir shadows within the screen.

The next morning, Stanton discovered that he grabbed the wrong bottle. He accidently gave Pete the pure alcohol that Zeena uses to take off her makeup.

After Pete's death, Zeena decides to teach the code to Stanton and a young beauty in the carnival, Molly. Stanton learns quickly and the act is quite successful. Until, that is, Stanton is discovered sleeping with Molly. It was assumed that Stanton was with Zeena, but he rested his hat on the fact that he never said that. That's how Stanton works.
Molly and Stanton end up getting married, leave the carnival and take their act to the nightclub circuit where they start raking in the cash. The Great Stanton becomes the hottest mentalist act around.

But that wasn't enough. Stantion wanted more. Greed can blind even the smartest of men and here it started to corrupt the act. Stanton decided to expand his repetitour to include speaking to the dead. With little information, this can be done by filling out what you know with generalities such as people walking though a field with a dog. "Every boy has a dog."

Before adjusting the act, Zeena returns to congratulate Stanton and Molly on their successes. At the end of the night, Zeena does a Tarot card reading for Stanton and she sees disaster is he takes this next step. Stanton disregards her and, with the help of a local psychologist, dupes a local socialite into believing that he could hear her daughter. (Actually, the introduction of the psychologist was marvelous. She was at one of the acts and asked about her mother. Stanton correctly saw though this and gambled by saying the mother was dead. She was.)

In the end, the psychologist was hustling the hustler. Something Stanton should have caught if greed didn't get the best of him. His great plan blew up on him and the demons of what he did to Pete and others in his path came back to torment him. Booze and mental illness broke Stanton and down he fell. All the way down.

I don't give away endings, but this wasn't a surprise, which made it scarier. We all knew it was coming. We all knew how Stanton was going to end up. Hitchcock aways said the difference between shock and suspense is simple. Shock is when a bomb goes off under your table. Suspense is when we see the bomb there, ticking, as the victim sits unaware. Suspense is harder. This was suspense. We all knew it was coming and there was nothing to do to stop it.
Stanton wasn't a really sympathic character. Actually, no one was. Zeena, Pete, Molly, the psychologist...saints need not apply here. But the geek is something you never wish on anyone.

By the grace of God, go thee.