Blanchett, del Toro on the femme fatale of ‘Nightmare Alley’

With a touch of Barbara Stanwyck, a sumptuous Art Deco office and a deadly shade of crimson lipstick, Cate Blanchett plays a femme fatale in Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” with cunning embrace and subversion of the film noir archetype.

If “Nightmare Alley” is del Toro’s lushly composed love letter to noir, the movie’s pulpy heart is in Blanchett’s conniving psychiatrist Lilith Ritter. She doesn’t enter the film until halfway

through, when Bradley Cooper’s carnival huckster, Stan, catches her eye in his nightclub mind-reading act, and the two begin scheming together. But when she does turn up, Blanchett shifts the film’s fable-like frequency, conjuring deeper shades of mystery from the movie’s rich tapestry of shadow and fate.

“We tailored the part for her, but she fit in those clothes on the first try,” says del Toro.

In “Nightmare Alley,” an adaptation of the ‘40s novel first made into Edmund Golding’s well-regarded 1947 film ( streaming on the Criterion Channel), Blanchett slides into one of the movies’ most iconic types by trading less on her character’s seductiveness than on her razor-sharp intellect.

Niko Tavernise / Associated Press Cate Blanchett as Brie Evantee, Tyler Perry as Jack Bremmer, Leonardo DiCaprio as Dr. Randall Mindy and Jennifer Lawrence as Kate Dibiasky in “Don't Look Up.”