Just how split can a personality really be? 1945's Hangover Square is a film noir about a man in a Jekyll and Hyde dilemma. Most of the time he's a respectable, prominent composer but sometimes he's a serial strangler, though he retains no memories of his crimes. This is an exceptionally good example of the fine point to which noir sharpened questions of free will and fate.
Laird Cregar plays George Harvey Bone, an excellent name for a noir protagonist and Cregar is perfectly cast. An enormous man with big facial features, he usually played villains. Here he was finally able to tackle something more morally complicated. His threatening physical presence adds weight (pardon the pun) to questions about his innocence. It was his final role before his death from a heart attack at just 31 years old.
We meet him staggering home after one of his lapses of memory during which we see him murdering a shop owner. He goes home to his fiancee, Barbara (Faye Marlowe), who knows about his memory lapses and commiserates with him, eager to help him solve the problem. She's beautiful and rich, too. Packaged with her extraordinary depth of sympathy, there's no reason in world Bone would take interest in another woman. And yet . . .
An exquisitely sleazy Linda Darnell walks into his life playing a small time musical hall singer called Netta. She sees Bone as her chance for the big time and starts buttering him up. George doesn't seem to have the will to resist her. He starts blowing off Barbara so he can spend time being played for a chump by Netta.
But he doesn't just blow Barbara off. When he tells Barbara he can't go with her to see a performance by the philharmonic, he goes to Netta and asks her if she'd go with him to that same philharmonic performance. He knows Barbara will be there with her father. Why would he set himself up this way? We don't find out because Netta blows him off.
All through this he behaves with an air of perfect sincerity, like he really believes he's an innocent man with blameless intentions. Which isn't so different from Dr. Jekyll, really. Anyone reading Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is likely to notice that Jekyll isn't the good man, he's the restrained man.
But Hangover Square takes another interesting turn when it really becomes about Bone's passion as a composer. This is especially effective because the film has an especially effective score from Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann composed the concerto that Bone finds himself obsessively needing to perform in the film's climax.
This is a really good choice because the music is a lot more interesting than Barbara. Instead of Bone being torn between a desire for Netta and Barbara, he's really torn between his muse and his lust. For those of us who know real artistic achievement requires discipline as well as passion, this is a pretty good story.
George Sanders has a small role as a Scotland Yard psychiatrist trying to help Bone and he's really good, turning what might have been a pretty dry "expert" role into something more interesting. And there's a really good use of Guy Fawkes Day as Bone encounters some kids in hodgepodge masks that are nothing like the uniform V for Vendetta masks most of the world knows to-day.
Of course the visual is another small piece of the film's rumination on persona and the amount of responsibility Bone has for his actions. Joseph LaShelle works up some marvellously gloomy, ghoulish cinematography, too. This is a great one.
Hangover Square is available on The Criterion Channel.
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