|
|
Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 45 |
|
BOOK AND FILM A Comparison of the Book with the Film Made From It |
|
The 1941 Novel by Patrick Hamilton The 1945 movie by John Brahm with Laird Cregar, Linda Darnell and George Sanders |
 LAIRD CREGAR ...his last great film role |
Fox cloned 'The Lodger,'
for Laird Cregar's last film
of TheColumnists.com
One can understand why studio executives at 20th Century-Fox felt they needed to mess about with the plot and characters and practically everything else about Patrick Hamilton's 1941 novel "Hangover Square" when they brought it to the screen in 1945.
After all, the principal character was a socially backward, mentally ill hulk of a man who seems destined to commit murder. What's more, the leading female character, though quite beautiful, is a self-centered, thoroughly reprehensible exploiter of men. There are no other major characters in Hamilton's book who aren't unsavory.
And filmmakers, of course, really don't much like to try and interest moviegoers in stories that have no likeable characters--for good reason: People usually don't buy tickets to films like that.
On the other hand, Hamilton's novel wasn't a cheesy paperback thriller. It really takes a hard look at a decadent segment of young London life just before the start of World War II. These are hard-drinking non-achievers, by and large, who live off others and don't care about anyone but themselves. One can only imagine how useful any of them will be to their fellow countrymen once the blitz begins and people start suffering all around them as German bombs fall. You naturally wonder how many of them will be changed for the better by some higher call to duty. It's a serious novel with only the veneer of a thriller.
And yet the Hamilton story, as written, would have been a hard sell as a movie in 1945 when the whole world still was reeling from the horrors of a global war. It must have seemed more intelligent to just nudge Hamilton's story in the direction of a terrifying thriller and ashcan all the sociological elements specific to English class society, things studio execs figure Americans wouldn't care much about anyway.
Marketing rationale surely entered the decision-making process. MGM had done major business in 1944 with "Gaslight," its thriller based on another dark Patrick Hamilton story. Ingrid Bergman had won the 1944 Best Actress Academy Award playing the wife being driven mad by her sinister husband (Charles Boyer) so he could be free to go after jewels hidden in the spooky old London house they shared. Hamilton's reputation in America had been growing after the success here of "Angel Street," the stage version of "Gaslight," and a 1940 British film version of "Gaslight" had been very successful ovcerseas.
So, naturally, the Fox executives would hope an overhauled "Hangover Square" could tap the same market vein as "Gaslight."
Also supporting that reasoning was the recent popularity of Fox's "The Lodger" (1944), which had elevated the studio's contract player Laird Cregar to star billing with his frightening performance as Jack the Ripper. Why not bring Cregar right back in a similar role--the psychotic George Harvey Bone of "Hangover Square," a man of huge proportions just like Cregar?
I'm also guessing that's why John Brahm, the German immigrant filmmaker who made the gloomy, chilling "The Lodger," also was assigned to direct "Hangover Square." Fox wanted it to be a dark thriller in the German noir style, Braham's specialty. But first the story would have to be totally overhauled.
And indeed it was.
"Hangover Square," the novel,
takes place mostly in 1939 as Germany starts its march across
Europe by invading Poland. But Barre Lyndon's screenplay pushes
the time period back to the turn of the century and the gaslit
London of "The Lodger."
In the book, George Harvey Bone lives on a dwindling amount of
money given him by his aunt. He does no real work. He's drifting
in life, like most of his pub acquaintances. But, for the movie,
he becomes a composer and pianist, verging on fame, needing only
that one great work to put him over at the concert hall.
Large and ungainly, the George of the book is socially inept. He has no females even remotely interested in him. But the movie gives him the lovely, sweet Barbara (Faye Marlowe), the daughter of the renowned symphony conductor (Alan Napier) who's been mentoring George and urging him to complete the concerto he believes will make George's reputation in the world of serious music.
As in the book, though, George has a nagging problem: The frequent "blackouts" he suffers. He fears he "does things" while he's not himself and, in the book, he has a growing conviction that his destiny is to kill Netta, the sexy woman he loves, even though he knows she's just been toying with him and using what money she can wheedle out of him. He doesn't act on these homicidal urges until the very climax of the novel.
But the movie makes us instantly aware that George is a walking time bomb because it opens with him murdering an antique dealer and setting his victim's lodgings on fire. This is something that never happens in the book.
Hamilton's original story finds George hanging out with a group of hard-drinking men whose primary focus is Netta, a beautiful young movie bit player whose career is going nowhere especially fast. She survives by sweet-talking George and making him think, if he plays his cards right, that he'll be able to have her soon. George wants her, of course, but not just for a bed partner. He wants her for his wife and hopes to go live in the countryside with her, behind a picket fence.
In the movie, Netta (Linda Darnell) is a music hall singer who meets the doting George when he composes a song for her act and presents it to her. Once she works that into her act, giving George no credit for it, she then starts pleading with him to forget about finishing his concerto and just start writing new tunes for her.
The person who brings George and Netta together is her pal Mickey (Michael Dyne), who serves as a kind of agent for her. Actually, there is a "Mickey" in Hamilton's book, but he's a minor player. Screenwriter Lyndon has taken another character called "Johnnie," George's only male friend in the book, and turned him into Mickey, giving him the additional function as Netta's career adviser.
The ambitious movie version of Netta connives in several directions at once, making her a true multi-tasker of the gaslit era. Her real goal is to seduce Eddie Carstairs (Glenn Langan), a powerful theater producer who runs the agency where Mickey works. (Trivia note: Langan's career took a nosedive in the late 1940s, but he's now best remembered for playing the title role in the drive-in sci-fi classic, "The Amazing Colossal Man.")This happens in the book, but Carstairs is wary of Netta and figures her for a golddigger from the start. Yet the movie has Carstairs fall for Netta and plan to marry her. This is the final straw that sends George into his ultimate blackout experience.
In "The Lodger," the young music hall performer who's the object of Jack the Ripper's desire is the girl friend of a young police detective, who begins to suspect the strange man living in her boarding house may be the serial killer who's terrorizing London's Whitechapel district. That idea obviously resonated with the producers of "Hangover Square," who decided to go ahead and add such a character to the story, even though Hamilton has nobody like him in the book.
Enter George Sanders, another star name to go above the title. Sanders plays Dr. Allan Middleton, a specialist in criminal psychology George consults with over his concerns about his "blackouts." Naturally, Dr. Middleton is attracted to George's loyal, but rejected "girl friend" Barbara, so he remains close to the heart of the drama that's building around the troubled mind of George Harvey Bone.
The ending of Hamilton's novel and the movie aren't alike at all, but I'll leave that for you to discover if you want to experience them both.
And I should take care in assuring you that both the novel and the movie are quite involving, the movie even more so if you have no prior knowledge of the story as Hamilton originally told it.
Many film critics consider Laird Cregar's performance as George to be his best-ever in his short film career. He most definitely turns in a fascinating portrait of this basically decent, but terribly disturbed man. His studio thought Cregar would develop into a great "heavy" screen villain like Warner Bros.' Sydney Greenstreet, but Cregar desperately wanted to avoid that sort of type-casting.
Sadly, Cregar never saw the completed film. He had been placed on a severe weight-loss regimen and took it further on his own because he deeply desired to re-shape himself into a Hollywood leading man. He was taking diet pills and may have overdosed himself by accident, dying of heart failure at the age of just 29.
Fox developed Vincent Price the way it wanted to develop Cregar, especially in films like "Dragonwyck" (1946) , but Price didn't really become a box office draw until he left Fox and segued into the horror genre in the 1950s with "House of Wax" at Warners, "The Mad Magician" at Columbia and his long string of Poe films at American-International. In later years, many thought another immense actor of great skill--Victor Buono--was going to be the new Laird Cregar, especially after Buono's role in "What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?" in 1962, but Buono also died quite young and never became a real headliner.
"Hangover Square" also was important in moving Linda Darnell up to leading lady roles in "A" pictures. Personally, I'm not blown away by her performance, which I find unconvincing and shallow. The rest of the cast, though, is uniformly good.
John Brahm's stylish direction and the beautifully-lit black and white rendering of gaslight-era London also are very strong plus values for the movie, but the other great reason to see "Hangover Square" today is the musical score by Bernard Hermann, the great film composer whose score for Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" had already put him on the map, along with his 1941 Oscar-winning score for "All That Money Can Buy.". Hermann soon would become the favorite composer of Alfred Hitchcock, the master of the thriller genre, and he went on to compose some of the greatest Hitchcock films, including "Psycho," "Vertigo" and "North by Northwest."
So, in the movie, it was Bernard Hermann, not George Harvey Bone, who finally completed the concerto that is played in one of the film's most mesmerizing scenes.
"Hangover Square," the novel, is now riding the crest of a renewal of interest in the works of Patrick Hamilton. (Hamilton, by the way, also wrote the play that Hitchcock adapted in 1948 for one of his most unusual--and commercially disappointing--thrillers, "Rope.") An excellent, attractive softcover edition is available from Europa Editions for $15.
The movie is now available on DVD and I especially like the boxed set called "Fox Horror Classics," which includes three films directed by John Brahm: "Hangover Square," in a beautifully restored version; "The Lodger" (1944), which had been filmed twice earlier, the first time as a silent by Hitchcock; and "The Undying Monster," a stylish, but little-known werewolf movie starring Heather Angel and John Howard.
In retrospect, I think "Hangover Square" suffers because of the effort to make it almost like a companion film to "The Lodger," but if you haven't yet discovered any of the great performances by Laird Cregar, this is a great place to start--with his best and last performance.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The photo is courtesy of 20th Century Fox. This column first posted Nov. 24, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|