| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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HANGOVER SQUARE
Rating: 
USA. 1945.
Director – John Brahm, Screenplay – Barre Lyndon, Based on the Novel by Patrick Hamilton, Producer – Robert Bassler, Photography (b&w) – Joseph La Shalle, Music – Bernard Herrmann, Photographic Effects – Fred Sersen, Makeup – Ben Nye, Art Direction – Maurice Ransford & Lyle Wheeler. Production Company – 20th Century Fox.
Cast:
Laird Cregar (George Harvey Bone), Linda Darnell (Netta Longdon), Faye Marlowe (Barbara Chapman), George Sanders (Dr Allan Middleton), Alan Napier (Sir Henry Chapman)
Plot: London, 1903. Composer George Harvey Bone is subject to periodic blackouts. He thinks he may have killed someone during one of these but is cleared of the crime by the police. But then he becomes involved with dancehall singer Netta Longdon. Her manager pushes her to string him along in order to get him to write music for her. But when he realizes that he has been used, George suffers further blackouts and is driven to grab a silk tie and start strangling people.
Director John Brahm had great success with the Jack the Ripper film The Lodger (1944). The Lodger had made a star out of 6’3” Laird Cregar, who had previously been a bit player in various thrillers and Westerns. Hangover Square was then quickly assembled, re-pairing Brahm and Cregar, as well as co-star George Sanders, while in further effort to copy The Lodger was also a period psycho-thriller set in London. (Although this is a Hollywood version of London filled with more American accents than English). Unfortunately Cregar died of a heart-attack prior to Hangover’s release, putting paid to a promising career as a sinister big man that was just starting to blossom. Brahm would go on to make one other mad killer film, the thoroughly mediocre The Mad Magician (1954).
Hangover Square was made before Psycho (1960), which introduced psychological (Freudian) motivation to the psycho-thriller, and way before The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its introduction of forensic psychology. In the 1930s and 40s, psychos went mad in grandly melodramatic style without any concern for motivation. All the motivation Cregar is given here is that whenever he hears a certain high-pitched noise he snaps, whereupon the camera goes into closeup on his sweaty face as he develops an unnerving glare and we then get his points-of-view as his vision goes blurry. It’s a terribly melodramatic vision of psychopathology. Certainly the lighting effects used and especially the opticals are unusually inventively. And all of this proves quite entertaining. Brahm winds the suspense up with suitably melodramatic regard – there’s a fine scene where Cregar conducts a strangling and then disposes of the body atop a Guy Fawkes bonfire. (Brahm even copied the same scene in The Mad Magician). The film goes out on the image of Cregar playing the piano as the house burns down around him, which is actually rather touching in the film’s melodramatic way. The symphony when unveiled proves to be suitably tortured and anguished and is really quite good. Although the piece that Cregar composes for Linda Darnell has the these days unfortunate title of ‘Gay Love’.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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