Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

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.

secondtake Hangover Square (1945)In a highly dramatic movie about a musician, it it significant that Bernard Herrmann wrote and conducted the score. Herrmann is the man behind the music for a whole slew of great movies from "Citizen Kane" to "Psycho." He writes with gutsy, vigorous originality, a striking counterpart to that other legendary composer, Max Steiner, who is more clever and graceful in his scoring. Herrmann feels more like a tortured serious composer trapped in a movie world, and it really works.Now throw in one of the handful of best cinematographers of the 1940s, Joseph LaShelle (around this time he did both "Laura" and "Fallen Angel") and you have a sensual film through and through. It's edited so tightly, and the plot with its murders and fires is so highly dramatic, it's breathless and bursting with angst. In a way, it probably isn't so much an escape for war-torn Britain in early 1945 but a reminder of it, a fictional echo of pure chaos and fear.The centerpiece of the movie is a young actor who I knew only from his really compelling role in "This Gun For Hire." This is the unlikely lead man, Laird Cregar, who died just after filming this movie, at the age of 31, due to complications caused by preparing for the part. He was a big man, and did a crash diet to lose 100 pounds (45 kilos) and ended up ruining his health, dying after emergency stomach surgery. An American actor, he fits into this completely British feeling movie partly because he studied and worked in Britain as a young man.But besides all that, it's possible that Cregar was pushing too hard to make the plot work. His attempts at depth and pathos sometimes seem wooden or contrived. Maybe the director is partly an influence, and certainly there are moments where Cregar looks right into the camera and lets his eyes go buggy. So all of it is at least partly exaggerated melodrama, and that's great stuff. This is, in it's mere 77 minutes, an excessive and almost maniacal movie. You might have to see it twice to get some of the fast things going on, but if you can keep the female leads straight as they come and go, the rest should fall into place. Oh, and George Sanders, one of my favorite secondary men in these British movies, is terrific but oddly underplayed, maybe to let Cregar have the spotlight.If you do like this as much as I did, you might want to know that the director, John Brahm, did a number of interesting films, including the terrific "The Lodger" which has some of this same edgy stylizing, and a dozen early "Twilight Zone" episodes. "Hangover Square" is a perfect entry into his style and work. Expect a lot, fast!

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.

bob_gilmore1 While RKO had Val Lewton and his psychological classic like "The Seventh Victim" and "Cat People" Fox had John Brahm, a much underrated director most famous for "The Lodger" a study of Jack The Ripper that also starred this film's leading man, Laird Cregor. For my money both Brahm and Cregor top themselves in this very similarly textured thriller about a classical pianist that suffers from a split personality. The bad news for him and those around him is that when he slips into "blackouts" that he takes the lives of those around him that he has disagreements with. There is no doubt that the success of "The Lodger" prompted Fox to re-teem the director with the star and also bring back George Sanders for a much similar role. This time rather than Scotland Yard detective Sanders plays a police alienist who Brahm initially seeks out when he has reason to believe that he has committed murder during one of the "missing time" intervals.Set in 19th century London, the film benefits from brooding atmosphere and a set peculiarity. It seems that the film is set while London engineers are digging up the streets to lay new sewer pipes and the presence up the upturned earth and pipes laying about creates a near documentary feeling. Recently released by Fox alongside "The Lodger" and another Brahm feature this set is a great bargain and should be snatched up before it vanishes from stores.