NGHTMARE ALLEY (2021)

Guillermo del Toro’s remake of the superb Tyrone Power/Edmund Goulding cautionary Carny-World creep-out gets off to a roaring start charting the swift rise of on-the-lam drifter Bradley Cooper, down on his luck, but knowing opportunity when he sees it.  (Twelve years older than Power, he's in even more of a hurry.*)  Budding up people who can help him succeed in this outfit of misfits (the better to get out), he takes what he can: a mind-reading con act from mentor-with-benefits Toni Collette & older/alcoholic spouse David Strathairn, advice from seen-it-all barker Willem Dafoe, a mate in lonely Rooney Mara’s Electrified Side-Show gal.  In the expected del Toro manner, art direction leans more baroque than needed (the 1947 original used a contemporary setting and let the carny milieu provide distancing), here, in 2021, the early ‘40s settings make sense and have their charms.  But an hour in, Mara & Cooper split for fame and fortune in Chicago, high society success with a classed up act, and the film all but shuts down.  Over-reaching on millionaires and slinky psychiatrist Cate Blanchett (very Faye Dunaway untouchable) with psychic cons, the film hits a structural wall solved in ‘47, but fumbled this time out.   That opening hour wasn’t a First Act, but a Prologue.  (Strictly speaking a second prologue.)  So we don’t so much stop as never get started on the weaker second half.  Worse, because del Toro so obviously doesn't know/understand these old-money people, nothing holds.  The original film foreshortened structure (probably the work of scripter extraordinare Jules Furthman) so the prologue functioned as a traditional first act and the rest fell into place.)  And while this may not explain the film’s distressingly weak commercial performance (it also flopped badly in ‘47), it may keep the remake from earning the earlier film’s strong cult following.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The original NIGHTMARE ALLEY.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/nightmare-alley-1947.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Sobering to realize that when Tyrone Power was Bradley Cooper’s age, he’d been dead a year.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Del Toro has released an alternate version in glistening b&w, initiated by seeing Cate Blanchett in a lighting check with the color removed.  Revelatory, according to Del Toro, who immediately noticed the advantage of monochrome in dramatic stylization and a powerful natural distancing effect (the face all planes & abstraction, yet paradoxically more realistic) bringing out echoes of Barbara Stanwyck/Lauren Bacall not seen in color.  Does it ‘fix’ the second half problems?  Perhaps another look?  Orson Welles didn’t call b&w photography ‘the actor’s friend,’ for nothing.