Hangover Square (1945)
As a fan of great Hollywood villains like Boris Karloff and Vincent Price, I’ve always been fascinated by the brief but brilliant career of Laird Cregar, who died two months before the release of his final film, Hangover Square (1945). Cregar chafed at being typecast as a villain, but he had that rare screen presence that makes for the most enthralling and delicious examples of the role, and his premature death at only 31 left his tremendous potential largely unrealized. Hangover Square reteams Cregar with director John Brahm, screenwriter Barré Lyndon, and costar George Sanders after their work on the previous year’s Jack the Ripper story, The Lodger (1944). Like The Lodger, Hangover Square is a moody piece of Gothic noir, loosely adapted from the 1941 novel by Patrick Hamilton, who also wrote the plays Gas Light (1938) and Rope (1948), both destined to become cinema classics. Cregar’s last performance, which plunges deep into an artist’s fractured psyche, is reason alone to see the picture, but the delirious score by Bernard Herrmann further elevates this originally undervalued thriller.
Cregar leads as gifted classical composer George Harvey Bone, whose friends encourage him to finish his concerto in spite of his worrying blackout episodes. George seems to have a chaste courtship going with his mentor’s daughter, Barbara (Faye Marlowe), but he’s instantly smitten when he meets the conniving Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell), who uses George to advance her own singing career. Dr. Middleton (George Sanders), a psychologist at Scotland Yard, warns George that the strain of his work is exacerbating his blackouts, but no matter what he does with his time, George continues to descend into murderous fugues whenever he hears loud, discordant sounds.
Hangover Square blends elements of the thriller, horror, and film noir against its Edwardian London backdrop to great effect, although it isn’t interested in a supernatural explanation for its protagonist’s lethal transformations. We know from the first scene that George Bone is both insane and a murderer, and we also know that he’s normally kind, sensitive, and even generous to a fault. Like Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man (1941), George is a good person in the grip of a terrible curse he has done nothing to deserve, but that doesn’t make him any less dangerous. Other horror classics have also depicted the sensitive artist as someone particularly susceptible to monstrous urges as a response to trauma; we see it in the various iterations of The Phantom of the Opera, especially in the 1943 version starring Claude Rains, and in House of Wax (1953) with Vincent Price. George suffers no physical disfigurement, and his black moods lack the transformative element of a Jekyll and Hyde figure, but discordant sounds pitch him into homicidal somnambulism that he later cannot remember. Cregar, repeatedly cast as a villain while yearning for leading man status, perfectly embodies George’s duality. His wide eyes and stunned expression are the only tools he needs to convey the character’s psychotic breaks. The horror of George’s situation lies in his inability to stop himself or protect people he cares about, like Barbara, from the violence of his involuntary urges. He has not brought this fate on himself through forbidden scientific experiments or egotistical ambition; he only wants to pursue his love for music and finish his concerto, even though Dr. Middleton thinks the music that gives meaning to George’s life is also a cause of his instability. Middleton advises George to take a break and experience “normal” life, but the doctor doesn’t understand that the discordance of “normal” life is really the thing that maddens the acutely sensitive composer.
The magnificent concerto reveals all the turmoil and Romantic sublimity of George’s imagination thanks to the score by Bernard Herrmann, and it swells to the foreground in the third act, when George debuts the composition and his mind reaches its final breaking point. It’s a terrific scene, the fiery culmination of George’s frantic efforts to compose his magnum opus in spite of Netta and his own shattered mind. Aptly titled the “Concerto Macabre,” the haunting, delirious piece evokes George’s yearning as well as his madness and impending doom. It reminds me very powerfully of Poe’s poem, “The Haunted Palace,” an extended metaphor about the mind’s descent into madness, where “vast forms… move fantastically/ To a discordant melody.” It’s difficult to imagine a more impressive example of musical phantasmagoria, and its legacy speaks to its ability to stir the dark recesses of an artistic mind. Stephen Sondheim, who first saw Hangover Square as a teenager, credited the score as an inspiration for his musical, Sweeney Todd (see this 2004 article in Playbill for a discussion of the movie’s influence on Sondheim). Herrmann composed iconic scores for other films, including Citizen Kane (1941), Jane Eyre (1944), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960), although his only Oscar win was for The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941). All of those examples share some thematic elements with Hangover Square, especially yearning, isolation, and madness, although Hangover Square gives Herrmann’s music special significance by making the score diegetic in George’s performance of it.
Tragically, Laird Cregar died of a heart attack brought on by the rapid, extreme weight loss he pursued during the filming of Hangover Square in order to achieve his dream of leading man roles. We can only imagine what his career would have looked like if he had enjoyed the long life of his friend, Vincent Price, who gave the eulogy at Cregar’s funeral. To see the young star in some of his earlier performances, look for him in Blood and Sand (1941), I Wake Up Screaming (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), and The Black Swan (1942). For more chills from director John Brahm, see The Undying Monster (1942). Catch Linda Darnell in another memorable femme fatale role in Fallen Angel (1945). For another of my favorite films about a brilliant but tortured composer, see Phantom of the Paradise (1974).
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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
