Hangover Square
Directed by John BrahmLondon, 1903. George Harvey Bone (Laird Cregar) is a large, gentle composer laboring over a serious piano concerto while supplementing his income writing popular songs for the music halls. He suffers from a dissociative condition: sharp, discordant sounds trigger blackouts during which he has no memory of his actions. When he emerges from one such episode to find a body and a bonfire, the pattern begins to take shape – though Bone himself cannot see it. His physician and friend Dr. Allan Middleton (George Sanders) is concerned but cautious, unwilling yet to name what he suspects.
Into this fragile existence comes Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell), a calculating music-hall singer who recognizes Bone's usefulness as a songwriter and cultivates his obsession without returning it. She is involved with Eddie Carstairs (Glenn Langan), a man of no particular scruple, and she manages both relationships with a practiced indifference to consequence. Bone, meanwhile, is genuinely drawn to Barbara Chapman (Faye Marlowe), a woman of steadier character who sees him clearly – but Netta's hold on his imagination proves impossible to break, and his blackouts grow more frequent as his concerto nears completion.
Hangover Square operates at the intersection of the psychological thriller and the period Gothic, using its Edwardian London setting to distance its violence just enough to permit a tragic rather than simply criminal reading of its protagonist. The film belongs to a cycle of Fox productions in the mid-1940s that imported German Expressionist atmosphere into studio genre work, and it asks whether a man who cannot remember his crimes is guilty of them – a question it pursues with more seriousness than most films of its kind.
