Hangover Square (1945)

What do you know? I finally had time to watch a movie! I've had this one from Netflix most of April, while my life has simply been too busy to find time to watch it or anything else. And what an enjoyable film this was too.

Laird Cregar plays the lead, George Harvey Bone, a brilliant, but schizophrenic composer, who gets siderailed by Linda Darnell, playing a sexy greedy manipulative songstress, who uses anybody she can to get ahead in the world (and then dumps them when someone mores useful comes along.


Faye Marlowe plays a beautiful pianist in love with Bone, though he can't seem to see how much she cares for him. And George Sanders puts in a turn as a good guy, a doctor Bone consults about his mysterious lapses in memories.


His mysterious lapses are episodes triggered by discordant loud noises. And once he trips over, he goes violent and murderous. When he finally snaps out of it, he can't remember what happened. A shopkeeper is murdered in the opening frames (very creepily, close angles, camera in POV of murderer), and Bone fears he may be guilty during one of his lapses. He goes to Scotland Yard, to George Sanders, for help, to find out if he's guilty and what he can do to prevent the lapses. Bone is a soft-spoken good guy who means well. He loves his music more than anything else, and his lapses in memory truly bother him. Laird Cregar always dominates a scene, and he is superb here, at turns gentle and quiet, letting himself be bullied around by Linda Darnell, who wants him to give up his concerto to write songs for her to sing (and advance her career), and then scary and ominous when he gets triggered. His life was so short, and it's such a shame. He was such a charismatic actor.


The movie features one of the most memorable ways to dispose of a body ever (I admit, I grinned in writerly delight at the cleverly beauty of it), and a spectacular finish. The running time of this film is only an hour and seventeen minutes, but it uses all those minutes well and, while Sanders is very under-utilized, the rest of it moves nicely in that short time frame.

The memorable score, including Bone's Concerto, is by Bernard Hermann.

Tyrone Power double feature

Captain From Castile (1947) and The Black Swan (1942). The first, I didn't particularly like. I have issues with sprawling movies that don't have cohesive plots. This one starts out okay, but then we get to the New World with Cortez and not much really happens after that point. Tyrone has minor random adventures, gets nearly killed twice, and mostly follows Smilin' Jack, aka Cortez, around the Mexico countryside while the latter prepares to conquer the Aztecs. There's no real point to it all, no conclusion either. Tyrone doesn't even get to take care of the Spanish Inquisition rat who murdered his sister, though he gets blamed for it. It's a rather sprawling, meandering, uncomfortable, and surprisingly brutal film. That's not to say it didn't have its good points. I liked the actors a lot, particularly Lee J. Cobb, love the scenery and the costumes, love the music, but other than Paricutin and Alfred Newman's famous and completely wonderful Conquest theme, there's not much memorable here for me.

I come from a family of geologists/astronomers, so one of the highlights of this film (and one of the reasons I rented it) was seeing the Mexican cinder cone Paricutin in action. It was erupting during this period, and the filmmakers made nice use of nature's display. The ash blocking the sun lends a different coloring to a lot of the outdoor shots and it's beautiful and atmospheric.

Paricutin erupting in the background, no CGI here!

The volcano's over the horizon in this pic, but look at that lovely ash cloud and the contrast it provides! Love it!

The Black Swan, on the other hand, I absolutely fell in love with. No pretenses about this movie. It's a rollickingly good, Technicolor, pirate adventure film. I don't think it's possible for Tyrone to look any hotter than he does in this movie. Being a ruffian suits him immensely, from the scruff to the outfits to the pirate attitude he tries to curb, to the swash on his buckle. And Maureen O'Hara is his lovely sassy leading lady, and there couldn't be a better match for him. They spark and rail against each other, beat each other up and fall in love on the high seas. It's just so much unrepentant and unpolitically correct (by today's standards) fun.

But really, the guy who steals the film is Laird Cregar. I swear, the man can do no wrong in a film. He's awesome in every film I've seen him in, and what a tragedy that we lost him at such a young age. He simply owns the screen when he's on, and not just because he's so physically imposing. He's got the charisma, the voice, the presence to go with it. I just love him. So many of the good moments in this film belong to him.

This is a film I'd definitely like to own. As far as pirate movies go, this one's way near the very top of my list.