Nightmare Alley-Tarot in the Movies

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So, I spent a good deal of time reading, annotating, and assessing Nightmare Alley, the 1946 book by William Lindsay Gresham. If you have not read this book, I would suggest you do so, although given people's sensibilities these days I suspect it will be a rough ride for many. But the relevant reason to do so, no matter your reactions to Gresham's style and content, is the structure of the thing is pure Tarot, even using the artwork of Pamela Colman Smith. I already linked to my article about the book in another thread.

Now I have also completed reviews of the two movies based on the book. It was pretty interesting to see how the people at 20th-Century-Fox back in 1947 dealt with the problems presented to them by Gresham's content. Many people at the time supposed the movie could not really be properly or in any way faithfully translated to the screen, because of limitations of the content code they had at the time and also because the studio really did not want their main action/romance star, Tyrone Power, portraying this truly despicable person, Stan Carlisle. So, you know, they made him less despicable. But one thing they did not do in the 1947 movie was get rid of Tarot. In fact, they expanded Tarot's role in the movie, and so far as I know, it was the first widespread presentation in film anyway of the Tarot artwork of Pamela Colman Smith. Yet, you will still not see this very much discussed anywhere. I mean, the cards show her signature, plainly. So that is interesting. And the readings are real—though you have to understand in Hollywood-ese basically they are props so sometimes cards in the same reading will change position because they patched together different takes of the same scene and maybe some cards got moved around during lunch or whatever. But that's OK.

The 2021 version of Nightmare Alley is however a much more problematic creature. It isn't a good movie. It certainly isn't a good representation of Gresham's book. And Del Toro, despite being an enthusiastic Tarot self-marketer, really took Tarot as a prop to a whole new level of blah superficiality. Tarot in Del Toro's NA has about as much relation to Gresham's use of Tarot as Bradley Cooper does to Stan Carlisle—or especially Tyrone Power. But, on the other hand, they do use Tarot cards in a couple of scenes, and while it is a kind of Marseilles knockoff, the cards aren't awful, and Toni Collette makes a decent Tarot reader. It's just that you know it is all pretty silly.

So here are my reviews (including Tarotical comments):

1947 NA with Tyrone Power
2021 NA with Bradley Cooper

Re: Nightmare Alley-Tarot in the Movies

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I haven't read the book or seen either adaptation, so I started with the book.

Thanks for the recommendation. I haven't read that kind of fiction - or much of any fiction - since the early '80s. I forgot how it feels rough the first few lines, paragraphs, pages... to suspend disbelief, to try to get an imagination going, trying to picture the scene as described, who these people are.

But it started to make sense, and now I'm at The Emperor.

Really enjoyable, a blast from the past, not so distant, it would have seemed almost contemporary in the '80s, but now it's another world, long gone.

No spoilers, obviously. I look forward to seeing how the Code-era dealt with it. And then on to the inevitable current version. I haven't read your reviews yet. I'll save those for when I've finished the book.
cron