Geek Chic

I've just been watching this:

Tyrone Power's finest acting hour, the marvellously bitter (if you ignore the tacked on sort-of-vaguely-happier ending) noir Nightmare Alley. The main attraction of the film is it's carnival setting - a fascinating world of outsiders, con artists, freaks and, the lowest of the low, the geek. The film is an adaptation of a supposedly far darker novel by William Lindsay Gresham, which I may well now have to track down. In a not-completely-coincidental way, I stumbled across Sideshow World the other day while a-browsing, so if you want to know more about the whole subject, that's the place to head.