If you google the various photos of Bradley Cooper in Nightmare Alley (Searchlight, 12.17), you’ll notice that aside from a natty moustache he’s otherwise clean-shaven. (Okay, maybe a little chin stubble here and there.). For a film set in the mid ’40s, which is when William Lindsay Gresham’s novel along with the original Tyrone Power film version were released, this is period appropriate.
The poster, however, is something else. Cooper is wearing a 14-day grubby manbeard, which was unheard of in the ’40s. Nobody and I mean nobody adopted this look until the debut of grubby-chic manbeards in the mid to late ’80s (GQ, Don Johnson, Miami Vice).
Anyone who wore two weeks of whiskers before the Reagan era was universally regarded as an alcoholic bum, a hobo, a down-at-the-heels loser, a beatnik or a hippie.
Cooper’s Stan Carlisle, remember, works as a kind of psychic-slash-fortune teller with a carnival, and later as a black-tie nightclub performer in this regard, and so he has a certain spiffy appearance to maintain.
