Hangover Square (1945)

[moon_custafer]

Andrew's been screening a lot of Marx Bros. movies this week, and yesterday, while A Night in Casablanca was running, I began looking up some of the supporting cast and fell down a rabbit hole of character actors that's had me on a mini Laird Cregar binge. This morning I watched Hangover Square (1945), and have so far processed the following:

1. In most Hollywood movies, writing popular songs for a sexy music-hall performer would be a step in the right direction for a classical composer -- she'd be bringing new blood to his art and dragging him away from his stuffy conservatory background and fiancee. This is not that type of movie, so Netta (Linda Darnell) actually despises George and is just using him. Actually watching the scenes of them working on a song together sort of undercuts this narrative, however -- they seem happy and engaged; in George's case, more so than in any of the scenes where he's working alone on his concerto. Yet another movie could probably have been made about how sometimes people are great creative partners but lousy romantic partners. This is not that type of movie either.

2. There's really a whole subgenre of Victorian/Edwardian noir, which doesn't seem to be much written about. This movie, The Lodger (1944), and The Suspect (1944) are all examples.

3. Except Hangover Square is arguably also a werewolf movie. Laird Cregar even has the same sort of hulking sadness as Lon Chaney Jr. in this picture; some of it perhaps due to being physically messed-up from amphetamines, crash dieting and surgery. Like his character, composer George Harvey Bone, he put his art before his own life. Unlike Bone, he seems to have only been fatal to himself; but it's still a tragedy.

4. George Sanders (Inspector Middleton) plays a much more sympathetic detective here than he does in The Lodger. Apparently he hated the line he was to have delivered, as Bone dies playing his final concerto in a burning building: "He's better off this way." After much arguing, he got it toned down very slightly to "It's better this way."

Comments

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

This interests me strangely. I suspect Laird Cregar/his characters may be my type. Unconventionally good-looking, messed up on drugs, fat, popular with the ladies, screwed over by the Hollywood system, played a lot of villains and wanted something more out of acting? This is my kinda celebrity crush. (Also see: Peter Lorre.) I should seek him out and see if I like his work.

I'm tickled to see you comparing someone to Lon Chaney Jr. as a positive quality. I love the hell out of his character in "The Wolf Man" and I've always felt that Larry Talbot was underappreciated.

I recommend "The Passing of the Third Floor Back" as a Victorian/Edwardian noir/Christian allegory/who the hell knows. It's based off of a play by Jerome K. Jerome, it stars young-and-pretty Conrad Veidt as a guy who may or may not be an angel, and it makes a pretty good movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026854/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_17

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Well I'm not sure if Cregar was popular with the ladies; I think he was more interested in being popular with the gentlemen. I do hope he was.

I've never actually seen the Passing of the Third Floor Back, but I'd heard enough to file it in the 'English Magic-Realist' genre, along with An Inspector Calls, Agatha Christie's Mr. Satterthwaite/Mr. Quinn stories, most of E. Nesbitt's books for children and much of Neil Gaiman (Margery Allingham and G.K. Chesterton play in the not-*quite*-supernatural end of this pool). Anyway, I'll look for a chance to watch it.

[sovay]

I should seek him out and see if I like his work.

Laird Cregar is great. I first heard of him through the Snarkout books by Daniel Pinkwater, where he's the favorite actor of one of the protagonists, Rat. Because so many of the pop-culture references in those books are invented, I assumed he was, too. I was delighted to find out he was quite real. I don't love the movie of Hangover Square because I read the source novel first and they differ sharply, but he is good in it.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I think almost every movie named or described in Avocado of Death is real, except (probably) Invasion of the Bageloids, because it sounds too much like something Pinkwater himself would have written -- indeed it may well be one of his other books.

"Laird Cregar" does sound like a made-up name, doesn't it? It's one of those ones with enough vowels you suspect it of being an anagram of something else.

[sovay]

I think almost every movie named or described in Avocado of Death is real, except (probably) Invasion of the Bageloids, because it sounds too much like something Pinkwater himself would have written -- indeed it may well be one of his other books.

The movies are mostly real, quite possibly because it's funnier that way,¹ but most of the local culture isn't. So except in cases where I recognized the actors or films, in middle school I had no reason to believe Jeff Chandler was any more real than the interminable sixty-verse folksong about the wreck of the Hortense Matilda McAllister. I mean, if you're used to Daniel Pinkwater's style and one of his characters describes The Terror of Tiny Town, sure, why not?

[edit] I do not believe that either Invasion of the Bageloids or Vampires in a Deserted Seaside Hotel at the End of August exists outside of Pinkwater's books, but Invasion of the Fat Men—seen by the protagonist of Lizard Music on late-night TV—was published by Pinkwater under the title Fat Men from Space the following year. I discovered it in elementary school shortly after reading Lizard Music and was not actually weirded out at all. Then for years I couldn't find it in another library and thought maybe I had made it up.

1. And really designed for film geeks, at the point when the book was published. It wasn't until I had access to IMDb that I could prove that he didn't invent Attack of the Mayan Mummy.