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Movie Review: Nightmare Alley (the Novel and the Adaptations) [1]
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Date: 2025-05-31
SPOILER ALERT!
The 1947 Movie
The first movie version of Nightmare Alley was released in 1947, a year after I was born, so naturally I did not get to see it then. Years later my mother told me about the movie, saying it was horrible, that in the final scene, Tyrone Power is eating a live chicken as an attraction in a carnival.
Needless to say, I wanted to see that myself. I have read that the movie was first shown on television in 1960, but I guess I missed it. Finally, at some point after cable television and video cassette recorders become available in the 1980s, I managed to see the movie.
Essentially, Tyrone Power plays Stanton Carlisle, who works in a carnival, where he is fascinated by the geek, the man who bites heads off chickens. He muses, “I can't understand how anybody could get so low.”
Stanton is having an affair with Zeena (Joan Blondell), who performs a mentalist act. She and her husband Pete had once used a code for such purposes, but he became such an alcoholic that he couldn’t do it anymore. One night, Stanton accidentally gives Pete a bottle of wood alcohol, which kills him. After that, he gets Zeena to teach him the code and give him guidance for cold reading, in which one relies on universal truths of human nature along with acute observations about a person to tell him about his own life.
Molly (Coleen Gray) also works in the carnival. She and Stanton leave the carnival to perform a mentalist act using the code. Eventually, that evolves into a spiritualist act, in which suckers are made to believe that Stanton the Great can communicate with the souls of the dead.
This act is helped along when he teams up with Dr. Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), a psychologist who can feed Stanton the dark secrets of her patients. He makes his biggest play on Ezra Grindle (Taylor Holmes), an old man of great wealth, who longs for Dorrie, his sweetheart of long ago, who died when she was young. Molly goes along with the scam, pretending to be Dorrie, but her conscience bothers her, and she ends up blowing the whole thing.
Stanton goes to tell Lilith what happened, but she cheats him out of most of the money they made together with a Gypsy switch and then threatens to tell the police what she knows about Pete’s death. Stanton gives Molly most of the money he has and tells her to make her way back to the carnival. (It is this act of kindness to Molly that makes us forgive him for being a cad.) He then takes it on the lam, eventually becoming an alcoholic tramp. He comes across a carnival and asks the owner for a job. At first, the owner says he has nothing for him. But then he reconsiders, saying there is one opening, but it’s only temporary, “Just until we can get a real geek.”
Stanton accepts the job, saying, “Mister, I was made for it.”
But then Molly shows up, saving him from his horrible fate, saying she will take care of him. When others realize he is “Stanton the Great,” one asks, “How can a guy get so low.”
The owner of the carnival answers, “He reached too high.”
All right, so my mother’s memory discarded this happy ending and the hokey explanation as to how someone could end up being a geek. In its place, her imagination visualized Stanton biting the head off a chicken, and that became part of her memory. But it’s often like that, where we ignore a tacked-on happy ending and hold fast to the essence of the story.
The Novel
When I saw the 2021 remake, I decided to read the novel to see which movie was more faithful to the original story. As is often the case when novels are made into movies, there is enough material in the book to be made into a television miniseries, for which reason a lot of stuff had to be left out in order to make the 1947 movie, which was just ten minutes shy of two hours. In addition to that, the Production Code that was in effect at the time naturally required some changes to stay within its guidelines.
In the novel, when Stanton asks the owner, Clem Hoatley, where geeks come from, he is told that geeks are not found, they are made. Clem says you find an alcoholic and offer him lots of booze, food, and a place to sleep. All he has to do is pretend to bite the head off a chicken, while actually faking it by using a razor. After a while, you tell him his services will no longer be needed because you need to get a real geek. The alcoholic is desperate, fearing the horrors of being deprived of drink, so he agrees to bite the heads off chickens for real. In the 1947 movie, when the owner of the carnival says the job is temporary, just until he finds a real geek, we think he’s serious. As such, it’s a great line.
In the novel, Stanton and Molly never marry. In the movie, after Stanton and Molly have sex, the other members of the carnival find out about it and insist, in the form of some strong-arming by Bruno, the muscleman, played by Mike Mazurki, that the two of them get married. When this movie was made, girls who had pre-marital sex almost always got pregnant, but I guess a shotgun marriage was considered sufficient for the purpose of satisfying the Production Code.
In the novel, Ezra Grindle does not merely miss Dorrie, the love of his life, but he also feels guilty about having pressured her into having an abortion, which led to her getting an infection that caused her death. Furthermore, when Molly appears as Dorrie, she is naked, and Grindle has sex with her. Molly is able to endure that, but then Grindle starts wanting to do it twice. That is too much for her, and she screams for Stanton to help her while fighting off Grindle.
Stanton is so angry when Molly ruins everything that he emerges from his hiding place and punches her. Even if she had not blown the con, Stanton had been planning on dumping her when it was over, leaving her for Lilith, with whom he had been having sex.
I said my watching the 2021 remake is what led me to read the novel, to see if the stuff in the former was based on the latter. In particular, it had to do with Stanton’s life before becoming part of a carnival. In the 1947 movie, Stanton says something about being raised in an orphanage. When asked whether he had any folks, he replies, “If I did, they weren't much interested.” He says he and the other kids were all beaten in the orphanage, so he ran away, but then ended up in reform school. He says that’s when he got wise and let the chaplain save him, after which he was paroled.
In the novel, Stanton has an oedipal fascination with his mother, smelling the perfume on her pillow while she is bathing. One day, while walking through the woods with his dog Gyp, he comes to an open field and sees a man and woman having sex. When they finish, the woman sits up, and he sees that it is his mother. Because Stanton covers for her when her husband begins to suspect something, she buys Stanton a magic kit, which leads him to becoming a professional magician, his job in the carnival.
Later in the novel, Stanton puts his head in Lilith’s lap, saying, “Mother, mother, mother!” Lillith subsequently tells him that he always wanted to have sex with his mother, and Stanton does not deny it.
Stanton’s mother runs off with the man she had been having the affair with. When Stanton’s father reads her goodbye note, he becomes furious. He used to beat Stanton regularly with a strop, and he would have taken it out on him that day, but Stanton wasn’t home. So, he beat Stanton’s dog Gyp to death. When Stanton arrives home, his father says Gyp was sick and had to be euthanized.
After Stanton gets into the spook racket and becomes famous as the Reverend Carlisle, he is invited by his father, who has remarried, to come home for a visit. During dinner, Stanton says he has been in touch with Gyp’s spirit, and though Gyp cannot talk, yet through feelings he communicated what happened that day, that he was beaten to death. Stanton’s father, who is not well, becomes apoplectic at being found out. As Stanton leaves, his father’s present wife is giving him pills prescribed by the doctor. Years later, after Stanton becomes a tramp, a hobo kicks the dog he is petting. This clearly reminded Stanton of his father’s cruelty to Gyp, resulting in a fight in which Stanton kills the hobo.
In the original story of Oedipus, he kills his father. Given that Stanton desired his mother, it is fitting that he would hate his father. When his father killed Gyp, that added to the antagonism that was already present.
Before moving on, there is one more section of the novel that I just have to include here. One night while Stanton is trying to catch a freight, he slips and almost falls under the wheels, but is saved by a Negro, who pulls him aboard. The man turns out to be the wisest person in the novel, as well as the most upright. He says he is on his way to work for Grindle, who is hiring colored men so that white workers and black workers will be at odds with each other, forgetting that it is Grindle that is exploiting them.
Stanton tries to con the fellow, but he isn’t buying it. Stanton gives up and starts complaining about how horrible everything is. He asks why God would create such a world, raising the ancient problem of evil.
The Negro is an atheist. He asks, if there has to be a God to create the world, then who created God? When people say to him that God does not need creating, his response is that maybe it’s the world that doesn’t need creating. The world, along with all the evil in it, simply exists. There is no need to try to square that with an unnecessary God.
He turns out to be a labor agitator, referred to as a specter haunting Grindle, reminiscent of the opening line of The Communist Manifesto.
I suppose he could be dismissed as a Magical Negro, but I couldn’t help but suppose that William Lindsay Gresham, the author, was speaking through him. But if so, it must have just been during his Marxist period, since he seemed to be continually drawn to the spiritual and the supernatural, even using Tarot cards as chapter titles of the novel.
Oh, I almost forgot. At the end of the novel, Stanton actually takes that job in a carnival as the geek.
The 2021 Remake
Because the original movie was in black and white and in the standard format, a remake in color and in widescreen would seem to be made to order. Furthermore, whereas the Production Code placed restrictions on the original, we might expect that a lot of stuff that was in the novel but excluded in the 1947 version could be shown in 2021 in all its offensive glory. And indeed, this version is full of gratuitous violence and gore.
Clem (Willem Dafoe) tells Stanton (Bradley Cooper) pretty much the same thing about how geeks are made, except that he adds a little opium to the alcohol that he gives the geek. This is illustrative of many of the contrasts between the novel and the two movies. The 1947 movie cleans things up a bit from the novel, while the 2021 version takes what is in the novel to the next level.
In the novel, as noted above, Grindle feels guilty about the abortion he pressured Dorrie to have. The 2021 remake says, “I’ll see you that abortion and raise you an abuser of women,” something the Grindle of this movie admits to being. On the other hand, in the remake, Molly does not appear naked, and Grindle does not have sex with her, which is surprising, since this movie is excessive in every other way. But then, Molly appears with abortion blood on her hands, and Stanton beats Grindle’s face to a pulp, so I guess that makes up for it.
Of all the differences between the novel and two movie versions, the most striking one consists in Stanton’s murder of his own father in the 2021 remake. The movie starts off with Stanton obviously having murdered someone and then burning down the house to cover up the crime. We later find out that it is his father. While his father is lying in bed sick, Stanton opens a window to the winter cold, pulls the blanket off his father, which he wraps around himself, and then sits in a chair and watches his father suffer. In the novel, given what Stanton’s father did to Gyp, and given his Oedipus complex, we understood why Stanton hated his father. But it would be unrealistic to expect the audience to have read the novel and brought that information with them to the theater. As we are given no reason for such cruelty in this remake, we can only conclude that Stanton is a psychopath.
And if he could do that to his father, then what about Pete? In the novel, as well as the 1947 movie, Stanton gives Pete a bottle of wood alcohol by mistake. But in this remake, signs point to his having done so deliberately. Clem shows Stanton the red box with the wood alcohol, which is poison, and the blue box with alcohol made from sugarcane, good for drinking. There is no way Stanton could have been confused when he sneaked in one night to get Pete a bottle, and we don’t see him selecting that bottle either, only what he does just before and just after. Furthermore, when we see Stanton pick up the code book right after he puts the bottle next to Pete, we are given the motive for Pete’s murder.
Conclusion
Maybe I’m prejudiced by the fact that I saw the 1947 movie before seeing the remake or reading the novel, but it is the original movie that I like the most of the three, by far. In general, Stanton may be a bit unlikable in the 1947 movie, but we are still able to identify with him and experience the horror of his descent into becoming a geek. In the novel, he turns out to be a real bastard, and in the remake, he is detestable from the very start. In both cases, we don’t really care what happens to him.
[END]
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