I often watch films from source materials, like novels, that I never have any intention of reading. However, with Nightmare Alley , I simply refused to watched the new film without first reading the source novel and then watching the original film starring Tyrone Power.
Over about three days, from when I started reading the novel through the completion of that task and passing through both film adaptations, I was granted a view into a worldview bereft of hope and even, possibly, happiness. Reading and watching all three versions, I was struck by the differences and similarities in the tellings.
If you wish to remain unspoiled for a nearly 70 year old novel, a more than 60 year old movie, and a newly released film, then feel free to skip. The Novel I think the best place to begin is at the beginning. William Lindsay Gresham was an American writer from Baltimore who had an early adherence to communism, fought with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War.
He would later go on to convert to Christianity after reading CS Lewis his wife, Joy Davidman, would go on to marry Lewis after her divorce to Gresham and even was active in the earliest days of Scientology.
He was a lost soul, and that comes through clearly in Nightmare Alley. He takes the electric woman, Molly Cahill, as his girl, and they leave to start their own two-person act for a wealthier crowd, especially after Stan cold reads a sheriff out to arrest several members of the carnival to the point where the sheriff simply leaves. With Molly at his side, he delves into spiritualism, acting as a medium to fraudulently connect the living with the dead. Using mechanical devices and his own ability to cold read people, he develops a pseudo-religion after convincing a rich widow to give him her mansion as a church to spiritualism.
