Hangover Square (1945)

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

One of my all time favorites.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Screenplay: Barré Lyndon. Allegedy based on the 1942 novel by Patrick Hamilton. Copyright 6 February 1945 by 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation. New York opening at the Roxy: 8 February 1945. U.S. release: February 1945. U.K. release: 9 April 1945. Australian release: 12 July 1945. 6,966 feet. 77 minutes. SYNOPSIS: London, 1903. A well-known composer is unaware that he has a split personality.COMMENT: This brilliant screenplay is virtually the unaided work of Barré Lyndon. Only the title, the names of the two principal characters (Bone and Netta) and the idea of Bone's split personality derive directly from the novel. Masterstrokes like turning Bone into a composer, setting the period back from 1939 to the turn of the century, inventing the trigger mechanism of the discordant noise (in Patrick Hamilton's novel, Bone just clicks in and out of schizophrenia without rhyme or reason), plus the film's highly-charged set-pieces (none of which, including the fiery climax, are even so much as hinted at in the book) can be credited solely to Lyndon.All the screenplay's marvelous effects are superbly realized by director John Brahm, who re-enforces their impact with extraordinarily fluid camera movements and highly imaginative compositions.The movie is also most impressively served by its star, Laird Cregar, whose crash diet led to his untimely death at the age of twenty-eight, shortly after this picture was completed. Bone's words, "Music is the most important thing in the world to me!" and Middleton's reply, "You're wrong, Mr Bone! The most important thing is your life!" could have been applied to Cregar himself by simply substituting "acting" for "music". Certainly the weight loss evident in the film has made a remarkably difference to his appearance. His features, flatteringly photographed here by Joseph LaShelle, are actually quite handsome. Allied with his natural acting ability and his magnetic personality, his charisma would certainly have built him into a star of the first magnitude had he survived. I like the soft-spoken voice he adopts here too. There's no doubt the operation of transforming Cregar from character player to major star was outstandingly successful. Only one minor drawback: the patient died. Bernard Herrmann's music score must rank as one of the finest ever composed for a motion picture. Other production credits are equally superlative, yet, oddly, the movie was not nominated by any body for any awards at all. Nor, incredibly, were contemporary critics particularly enthusiastic.

"Hangover Square" has always been my favorite film noir because of that incredible noir brainstorming : John Brahm directing (he found his best level in this genre), Bernard Hermann's haunting music, Joseph LaShelle vertiginous camera, Barré Lyndon's script from the Patrick Hamilton's novel. And in addition to these fantastic creators, the casting : Linda Darnell, George Sanders and the hallucinating Laird Cregar, who died too quickly. He was really hypnotizing playing this dangerous sleepwalking character, I always find this story completely scary each time I see the movie. "Hangover Square" is a very superior criminal movie with a desperate love story. Masterpiece.

Hangover Square turned out to be the premature farewell performance of Laird Cregar who starred as the mad composer/pianist who both creates beautiful music, courtesy of composer Bernard Herrmann and strangles people who get on his wrong side.The film if it had to be a farewell was a great one as it is dominated by Cregar's performance who like in The Lodger gets both the pity and revulsion emotions going with the viewer. Cregar is all the more frightening because he seems like an overgrown child.Scotland Yard has put an early version of a forensic psychologist in the person of urbane George Sanders on the case. Oddly enough Cregar comes to him to try and find an explanation for the blackouts he's suffering which occur not coincidentally around the time of another strangulation.His last victim is Linda Darnell who is a saucy vixen of an entertainer in need of new material. So Cregar the classical composer goes to work for her giving her music hall ballads for her act. She's stringing him along toying with some very unstable emotions. She comes to a most interesting end.This is also the only film I know which worked the British holiday Guy Fawkes Day into the plot. As you know those across the pond celebrate it with bonfires and it's certainly an interesting way director John Brahm uses it.The famous Hollywood legend about how Laird Cregar endangered his health by trying a crash diet and then going for surgery to shrink his stomach is supposedly because Cregar wanted to get leading man roles, but his big frame and girth worked against that. After Cregar died another actor who embraced his big frame and girth and played a variety of roles that Cregar might have been considered, came on the scene. That fellow's name was Raymond Burr.Still Hangover Square is a wonderful if premature farewell for a great talent who left us at least an appreciable body of work to gauge his talent.

In this variation on the Jekyll and Hyde story, a composer has sporadic episodes where his subconscious takes over and he has no recollections of his actions during these lapses when he comes to. This film reunites Cregar and Sanders with director Brahm from "The Lodger" the previous year, and, like the earlier film, it is visually opulent but the story is less than compelling. Cregar gives perhaps his best performance in this, his final film before his untimely death at age 31 just as he was coming into his own. Darnell, who would also die young, is a sensuous presence as the object of his obsession. Herrmann provides an impressive score, including a piano concerto used in the finale.