John Brahm | Hangover Square / 1945

better off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barré Lyndon (screenplay, based on the novel by Patrick Hamilton), John Brahm (director) Hangover Square / 1945

 

For the most part in writing about the essays in My Queer Cinema I have attempted to make a clear delineation between the actor and his or her character. Only in the case of figures such as Ivan Novello, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Rock Hudson, and a few others, wherein the homosexual actor, seemingly conspiring with their writers and director to create coded gay figures inside the heterosexual outer shell of the character required by the plot, do I bring in the issue of the actor’s sexuality as being important to the film. As I joke, Grant and Hudson played gay coded figures so often that you might have thought that they had written into their contracts. And actors such as Novello, Farley Granger, Anthony Perkins, and other Hitchcock heroes were simply too beautiful for that brilliant director to resist suggesting other sexual complications in his characterizations. Hepburn, as Cukor argued, was determined to play certain strong female feminist roles which, in the terms of Hollywood character stereotypes of the day, brought her closer to lesbian identity.

       Although not all of them were gay or lesbian, the numerous crossdressers and pansies of the earlier films had required a certain male or female type which often included the sexual “aberration” which the role satirized or mocked.     

     And so too in the 1940 and 50s there were some actors who simply because of their voices and/or mannerisms were hired to play villains or comic supporting roles who, although necessarily presented as heterosexuals in the script, read to most of their audiences as being gay, bisexual, or lesbian, hinting at their actual sexuality even though they generally denied it or joined in lavender marriages to hide it. Since they were villains or fussy second bananas and homosexuality was perceived as representing evil or at least abnormal behavior, film casters and directors did not at all mind that they behaved slightly odd or queer both in and out of costume. In fact it was why they were hired. The examples of these individuals are actually quite numerous, but three immediately stand out, each of whom made their greatest impact in movies of the 1940s and 50s when even cleverly coded films were carefully combed through by the Hays people: Raymond Burr, Vincent Price, and the writer I am focusing on in this essay, Laird Cregar. These three all appeared in noirs, horror, and monster films which permitted a niche in which their morality was at issue which made it allowable for them to appear somewhat gay; they were after all “wicked” or, better yet, psychologically sick beings according to the script. Both Burr and Price would also occasionally play heroes, as Cregar might have if he had lived longer.

      Clearly in the 1945 British film Hangover Square Cregar was attempting to escape being typecast as he had recently been in the 1941 film  I Wake Up Screaming and The Lodger (1944) where he played psychopathic murderers. For Cregar, in particular, it was also a matter of his weight of he had been conscious throughout his life. In being asked to play a character in John Brahm’s newest film, he was scripted to play a distinguished British composer named George Harvey Bone—already a clue that there was something strange about him; if you recall Katherine Hepburn pseudonymously names Cary Grant, Mr. Bone in Bringing Up Baby—but was romantically involved with two women, the proper Barbara Chapman (Faye Marlowe) and a night-club singer Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell) which he felt might be used to his advantage to create for himself a more romantic, leading man. And in order to gain more acceptance as such a figure he underwent a severe crash diet, mostly through the consumption of amphetamines, which forced the studio to film chronologically so that his weight-loss appeared to be part of the plot itself and resulted in his sometimes erratic behavior. Within a few weeks after shooting, Cregar died of a fatal heart attack brought on by his weight loss, and did not get to see the final film when it was released.

 

     Part of this desire to change his image surely had to do with the fact that just two years earlier Cregar’s lover, the young actor David Bacon, was attacked and killed with a knife. The tabloids quite quickly linked Cregar to Bacon describing him as “such a good friend” of the victim, leading Darryl F. Zanuck to arrange for a Silver Screen article to romantically link him with actor Dorothy McGuire which reported that, despite his weight, the actor was considered quite sexy by many women. Surely Cregar sought to erase the weight equation.* 

   We all know that there is no “gay sounding voice,” that homosexual men speak in thousands of various tones and intonations just as gay men look as different from one another as does the general population. And yet, I have to admit there are certain timbres of the voice, careful intonations of words that inexplicably hint at the individual’s sexuality. Both George Sanders, who also performs in this film and Cregar simply “sound” gay—although Sanders, who was married several times including to two of the Gabor sisters, Zsa Zsa and Magda, was apparently not homosexual—and directors cast these individuals as effete wicked beings for precisely this reason (Sanders plays such figures, for example, in Rebecca and, most notably, All About Eve). Cregar is simply possessed of such a voice, and even revealing that he was after all quite good looking, has a face that was made for this role: a fussy, effete, artist—just such characteristics needed also to play Oscar Wilde, a stage production of which in 1940 won him rave reviews and the attention of the Hollywood studios—who in this case is also psychologically affected by noise (a situation that hints of the same condition of Poe’s Roderick Usher) that makes it clear that we will never win the love of the showgirl Netta, for whom he wastes his precious energies while he should composing his concerto by spinning off popular songs for her new musical, Gay Love**—surely not an accidental use of the word “gay” since Cary Grant had publicly revealed that word’s urban usage in his 1938 film Bringing Up Baby.

 

     Although, Bone is convinced of his love for Netta, even she hints that although he has spoken nice words, he was never even attempted to “get close,” and she describes her seduction of him as a painful experience to both her friend Mickey (Michael Dyne) and the man to whom she gets engaged to be married, Eddie Castairs (Glenn Langan). Her love for him is a pretense to milk her for her successful musical numbers. 

   Barbara, the music-loving pianist, who is the daughter of the great conductor Sir Henry Chapman (Alan Napier), may believe she loves the man of such talent, but it is a pure and prim kind of love by which composer Bone is not aroused...if he is ever by women aroused. He treats her more like a loving sister, admitting his most personal of problems including the fact that even he believes that something is wrong with him, having suffered throughout much of his life by moments of blackout but which has suddenly, as the film opens, stealing an entire day from his life as he returns home without remembering anything that has happened.

 

     We see what has happened, as he stabs a Jewish shop owner of fine art curios. In a clearly anti-Semitic slur, the doctor-detective Dr. Allan Middleton (Sanders) who Bone consults—when after reading in the newspaper of the shop owner’s murder, he fears he may somehow in involved—absolves him of the crime suggesting the victim had been cheating his customers, hinting that he somehow deserved being murdered. Yet despite the fact we have seen Bone plunge the knife into the victim’s chest, Middleton finds no trace of blood on the weapon nor can he match the blood on the composer’s coat with that of the shopkeeper’s. Nonetheless, he still suspects him, and even has Bone followed.

        Upon his second near-blackout, when he discovers Netta has been lying to him about her activities, the composer unsuccessfully attempts to strangle Barbara, who still does not suspect her friend, would-be lover.

      But by his third blackout, when after discovering that Netta is about to marry Carstairs, he kills her, placing her body at the top of a pyre set up in celebration of Guy Fawkes Night,*** although police still have no evidence, Middleton finally puts together the facts and prepares to arrest the murderer, who escapes to finally perform his completed concerto with Barbara in attendance and her father conducting.

      Finally, trapped by the police, Bone sets fire to the place, and realizing his own monstrosity, plays the remainder of his concerto until he is burned alive, Middleton commenting to Barbara, not so very differently from his statement about the Jewish shopkeeper, “It’s better this way.” Bernard Herrmann’s own “Concerto,” accordingly becomes to true unspoken hero of this work, surviving its fictional composer and outshining all the film’s characters in its splendiferous sounds.

      I wonder what Cregar might have thought about his performance if he had seen it. Certainly it’s a tour de force, among the best of noir incarnations of the often unintentional evil that propels such plots. One wonders, however, whether he would have seen an actor in himself able to take on leading man, romantic roles. I fear not. And, most terrifyingly, you can almost hear Zanuck or some other studio exec saying the cruel words they actually had wanted Sanders to speak, but which he absolutely refused to utter: “He’s better off this way.”

 

*As any reader has surely realized by this time, I am fascinated by unlinked connections and coincidence. Raymond Burr was also obsessed by his weight, particularly early on in his career. As he revealed in a 1993 interview in the Toronto Star: "I was just a fat heavy. I split the heavy parts with Bill Conrad. We were both in our twenties playing much older men. I never got the girl but I once got the gorilla in a 3-D picture called Gorilla at Large. I menaced Claudette Colbert, Lizabeth Scott, Paulette Goddard, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck. Those girls would take one look at me and scream and can you blame them? I was drowned, beaten, stabbed and all for my art. But I knew I was horribly overweight. I lacked any kind of self-esteem. At 25 I was playing the fathers of people older than me."

 

**In another interesting but somewhat unrelated coincidence, after Netta Longdon’s murder, we see the poster of her play Gay Love begin plastered over with another announcing a performance by French dancer/actor Gaby Deslys, an historically real performer interviewed by Djuna Barnes in April 1914. If Netta is clearly a woman who has used the admiration of a gay man to benefit her career, Deslys was known for her absolute “deviltry,” rumored to have stolen Jean Cocteau’s heart (he wrote a prose poem about her) and infatuated Sir James M. Barrie, the Scottish creator of Peter Pan (he wrote an entertainment for her, Rosy Rapture). In her interview, Barnes claims to steal away her reputation for that deviltry, revealing her to be simply an exhausted young doll-like girl—precisely the kind of woman Barnes herself loved. One has to wonder whether set decorator Thomas Little, who designed some 504 film sets over his career, including for Laura and All About Eve, was subliminally telling us something that even director John Brahm didn’t know.

 

***Finally, it is perhaps worth nothing that it is on Guy Fawkes Night that director Ken Russell choses for his Oscar Wilde character to attend the last (and only) performance he saw of his play Salomé in Salome’s Last Dance (1988), during which of course a great deal of sexual activity occurs.

 

Los Angeles, January 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).