Hangover Square

One year after releasing his first collaboration with Laird Cregar on a Gothic serial killer story set in period London (The Lodger), director John Brahm did it again with Hangover Square, this time with even more drama and even bigger set pieces. Based on Patrick Hamilton’s black comedy novel published in 1941 (any comedy was excised for the film adaptation), the Edwardian-era film is brilliantly written and performed, but these strengths pale in comparison with its sensory impact which blends some of the most exhilarating B&W cinematography of the noir cycle with a dramatically powerful score from the legendary Bernard Herrmann, including an original piano concerto as the narrative’s centerpiece. Arriving home one night with a head wound and bloody knife in his pocket but no memory of leaving the house, distinguished composer George Harvey Bone (Cregar) begins to suspect himself of murdering Londoners (we soon learn he enters a fugue state when upset), so he notifies a doctor friend (George Sanders), who begins to monitor him. Later, having been seduced, used (for his music), and discarded by ambitious actress Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell), Bone becomes the primary suspect when she disappears, Bone’s mental schism finally out in the open. Brahm films the enormous bonfire scene on Guy Fawkes Day for maximum excitement, crane shots descending on the blaze and panning with Bone’s dramatic climb on the ladder, masked residents encircling the conflagration hand in hand, chanting and shouting like some eerie, funerary celebration. Throughout the film, Brahm uses overhead shots, Dutch angles, and low angles to invent unique perspectives; Bone’s apartment door is often shot from under a cabinet, as if we’re his cat lying in wait. The final sequence, however, is its own masterpiece [spoiler alert]: Bone finally performs his concerto in a dramatic music hall, each orchestra member’s music stand lit by a candle (a detail with which most directors wouldn’t have bothered), the camera swooping through the listening audience as Herrmann’s arrangement builds up power, allegro shifting to adagio and back again, camera gliding across keyboard, Bone’s mind finally drowning in all his violent memories, until the hall itself is soon consumed by flames. (Sadly, this dramatic ending for his character proved all too ominous for Cregar, who died of a heart attack after filming was done.)