Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Whitech It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

Jemima It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Gizmo This is a cracking little thriller with so much going for it: a huge and wonderfully detailed period reconstruction of a foggy London neighbourhood (in a studio in California), Bernard Herrman's thunderous score, the still-chilling bonfire night scene and inferno-like ending, and constantly eerie, inventive and propulsive photography that could just as easily have come from Citizen Kane or Strangers On A Train. It also features one of the best opening scenes I've seen, with the camera swooping up from the cobbled streets, swiftly through an upstairs window and into the eyes of a first person shooter taking someone's life - Hardcore Henry 70 years before its time. I knew I'd seen Laird Cregar, the lead in the film, before and wondered what became of him later, only to discover that this was in fact his last film, released two months after his death at the age of 31. A soft, hazy and monstrous performance in the lumbering body of a gamma-radiated Oscar Wilde.The film somehow falls maybe just one small step short of true greatness, and it's hard to say why - perhaps Laird is not likeable or compelling enough, or one is not made to care enough for any of the characters - but certainly it's as good as many of Hitchcock's second-tier films, such as Rope (written by the same author, incidentally) and really deserves to be much better known.

bkoganbing Hangover Square turned out to be the premature farewell performance of Laird Cregar who starred as the mad composer/pianist who both creates beautiful music, courtesy of composer Bernard Herrmann and strangles people who get on his wrong side.The film if it had to be a farewell was a great one as it is dominated by Cregar's performance who like in The Lodger gets both the pity and revulsion emotions going with the viewer. Cregar is all the more frightening because he seems like an overgrown child.Scotland Yard has put an early version of a forensic psychologist in the person of urbane George Sanders on the case. Oddly enough Cregar comes to him to try and find an explanation for the blackouts he's suffering which occur not coincidentally around the time of another strangulation.His last victim is Linda Darnell who is a saucy vixen of an entertainer in need of new material. So Cregar the classical composer goes to work for her giving her music hall ballads for her act. She's stringing him along toying with some very unstable emotions. She comes to a most interesting end.This is also the only film I know which worked the British holiday Guy Fawkes Day into the plot. As you know those across the pond celebrate it with bonfires and it's certainly an interesting way director John Brahm uses it.The famous Hollywood legend about how Laird Cregar endangered his health by trying a crash diet and then going for surgery to shrink his stomach is supposedly because Cregar wanted to get leading man roles, but his big frame and girth worked against that. After Cregar died another actor who embraced his big frame and girth and played a variety of roles that Cregar might have been considered, came on the scene. That fellow's name was Raymond Burr.Still Hangover Square is a wonderful if premature farewell for a great talent who left us at least an appreciable body of work to gauge his talent.

Lawson Hangover Square features the story of a pianist with a dual personality who murders people who offends him. Pity the poor singer who uses him to write her music and dumps him to marry a rich man. The movie is remarkable for its performances. The gorgeous Linda Darnell vamps it up as a woman determined to get rich and famous, but the standout is Laird Cregar, who apparently lost so much weight for this last movie role that he died soon after. He effectively alternated between pushover and insane, playing the latter emotion especially well, particularly in the last scene in which he had to finish his concerto.

dougdoepke 20th Century Fox excelled at costume drama. Surprisingly, this feverishly baroque melodrama may well be the apex. And what a beautifully mounted movie it is, with its sumptuous recreation of turn-of-the-century London, from well-appointed drawingrooms to rain-slickened cobblestones. And who better to frame the rococo sets than the much underrated director John Brahm. Note the exquisite dining table with Darnell and Cregar, photographed through glittering chandeliers, suggesting a dream-come-true for the emotionally repressed composer. In fact, the visual detail from one camera set-up to the next seldom falters, a genuine triumph of collaborative artistry.Sure, the story is not exactly Citizen Kane. Too bad that with his finely tuned ear, wacky composer George Harvey Bone (Cregar) tends to blackout and lose control whenever jangly noise interrupts his creative reverie. We know because his eyes bulge, his nostrils flare, and the features contort into a grotesque mask, thanks to the director's extreme close-ups. All in all, Cregar is excellent as the epicene Jekyll and the madman Hyde. Couple that with the deliciously trollopy Linda Darnell and it's a real odd couple as she works the poor guy for her own selfish ends. But then she doesn't know she's playing with fire.Speaking of flames and running amok, what a great "twilight of the gods" finale, a real tribute to the special effects department. So there he sits deliriously unaware, banging out his concerto masterpiece, a perfect example of music to go mad by and die by. Then too, how about that tower of kindling for the Guy Fawkes Day celebration. I never thought anything so inanimate could look so menacingly evil. But it does.Anyhow, the treatment may be a lot more artistic than the plot deserves, but the result is still a whole heck of a lot fun.