Thanks in part to the pandemic, Guillermo del Toro spent the better part of four years bringing his version of NIGHTMARE ALLEY to the screen. He is a highly accomplished filmmaker, with a vast reputation for creatively extending themes and visual motifs in the horror genre, which resulted in an Oscar win for THE SHAPE OF WATER at the 2018 Academy Awards.
NIGHTMARE ALLEY was his followup, with del Toro collaborating with Kim Morgan (whom he subsequently married) in an ambitious effort to retool the legendary 1947 classic that starred Tyrone Power as the self-aggrandizing Stan Carlisle, destined to fall in a manner similar to the Icarus myth because he heedlessly "reached too high." Likewise, Kim Morgan aggressively seized an opportunity to step up from film critic to screenwriter, with the ostensible conviction that she and del Toro would be more faithful to William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 source novel.
Meanwhile, the Film Noir Foundation, friendly to Morgan over the years, organized a suite of written content in its house organ NOIR CITY that would focus on NIGHTMARE ALLEY, in part to pay lip service to the original film, but also to exhort its readership to embrace the new version. The film, while technically accomplished, is not substantially more faithful to Gresham's novel, but FNF head honcho Eddie Muller took up the gauntlet for it in a review that (as we noted in the excerpt from a more expansive evaluation of the just-released issue) he probably should have delegated to another writer.
The excerpt below zeroes in on the thematic and narrative flaws and subversions extant in the del Toro/Morgan screenplay, which fatally compromises the notion that the screenwriting duo were more faithful to the source novel, and that they demonstrated "reverence for the 1947 film version," which is a sample of the whitewashing undertaken by Muller in his review of the film.
And, jumpin' Jehoshaphat, that's just what leads off the issue: carnival noir, as surveyed by poet, culture critic and new NC contributor Brent Calderwood, most recently writing for THE FILM EXPERIENCE. The feature starts well, but runs out of steam just the way that carnivals did (as noted in the intro) when urbanization overtook America's agrarian roots. Reading the feature's footnotes, one senses that they may have been provided by an editor to simulate a comprehensive list of film noir titles that were (even slightly) touched by the carnival. (Alas, two notable examples of classic French noir with strong ties to the "carny world" were overlooked: drop me a PM for the identities of these two films, as there's no reason to simply give away that information to those who don't quite complete their research assignments.)
It's followed by a condensed and retouched interview conducted by Calderwood with Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan as part of "the tout" for the new version of NIGHTMARE ALLEY. "Retouched" seems like a good description: del Toro is an eloquent fellow, but reading his responses really gives the impression that they were polished for publication. In it, there is his relentless attempt to connect his film with some form of ongoing political critique of America, while insisting that [William Lindsay] Gresham's novel is highly autobiographical (when it is more likely that Gresham's obsession with the world of the carnival and his fascination with the Tarot had coalesced into a richly lurid fictional depiction of a composite of characters he'd met or who he'd been told about). It appears that the "shut eye" concept--coming to believe in one's own patter about the creative project one is trying to put across to the public--may be enveloping the husband-and-wife team as well.
Finally, there is a review of the new film from Eddie [Muller], where he treads as lightly as possible on the production, positioning himself in the "rave with minor reservations" category. It's an interesting tap dance, where Eddie notes the Icarus theme of the original story but pretends not to notice how that is subverted by the filmmaker/screenwriters into a Oedipal tale (with additional scenes and pseudo-talismanic characters--the "pickled devil baby"--that do not appear in the source novel). He also states that he won't compare performances between the two versions, and--then goes ahead and compares performances between the two versions. (While he praises Rooney Mara to the skies, note that it's Coleen Gray on the cover of the magazine.) Eddie also endorses the "arming of Lilith Ritter" even while he tiptoes into an admission that "superfluous gore" seeped into the film--a significant portion of which came from giving Lilith a gun (and a strange body scar that also was not found in the novel). Frankly, given his friendship with Morgan, Eddie should've delegated the review to his "managing editor" Vince Keenan (Vince is actually "editor-in-chief," Eddie--that was a revealing Freudian slip in the email blast announcing the new issue...) or to someone else with no noticeable conflict of interest.
The new NIGHTMARE ALLEY has many strengths, but they are mostly technical. Even its supporters acknowledge that it is too lengthy; some of these (including Muller) note the strong uptick of violence, particularly in Stan Carlisle, who is not presented that way at all in the source novel or in the 1947 version. Muller attempts to suggest that such criticisms stem from the "churlish" curmudgeons who disdain virtually anything modern; but he simply runs away from the issue of the two films' comparative fidelity to Gresham's novel. He leaves what really matters about the true worth of the film unexamined, possibly in hopes of swaying the wobbly attendance figures that the film has been receiving since its fatefully delayed release on December 17 (originally scheduled for December 3 and no significant challengers at the box office, it lost two more weeks due to delays in completion of the final edit and thus ran into the blockbuster SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, which obliterated all of its competition from Day One and continues to do so as 2022 begins).
It appears that, barring an unforeseen turnaround, NIGHTMARE ALLEY's box office fate will be entirely left in the hands of what American movie moguls still call "the overseas market." The good news is that as a director originally from Mexico and with a solidly established international reputation, del Toro is solidly positioned to draw robust audiences for the film outside the US. (His Oscar winner THE SHAPE OF WATER, for example, did twice as much business in foreign markets.) He is already at work on his next film, a mixed live-action/stop-motion version of PINOCCHIO. His wife's screenwriting career may be another matter entirely, however.
