Hangover Square

In adapting Patrick Hamilton's seminal novel of the seedy side of 1930s London life, Hollywood got just about everything wrong. The book's main character is George Harvey Bone, a schizophrenic who suffers from 'dead moods' in which his behaviour becomes unstable and eventually murderous. Hamilton takes us inside his head from the very first word, and manages the difficult feat of making him a sympathetic figure. Bone is smitten with Netta, a failed actress, who - together with her spiv friend Peter - bleeds him dry for money and booze, and manipulates his affections for her own amusement. Despite tantalising suggestions of redemption for the main character, it all ends badly. Bone smashes the back of Peter's skull with a golf iron, drowns Netta in the bathtub, and then gasses himself in a seaside boarding house.

Wisely, the film retained the title (which is surely one of the greatest titles ever), but little else. The action was transfered to the turn of the century (possibly because the studio had some available costumes and sets), and Bone becomes a tormented composer-pianist. He strangles rather than drowns Netta, who is a music hall dancer in the movie, and then disposes of her body on a huge Guy Fawkes Night bonfire. Bone is finally consumed by his madness when he gives a performance of his piano concerto in a burning concert hall. As an adaptation of the Hamilton novel, it is a disaster. However, taken on its own terms as a piece of ripe Hollywood melodrama, it's an enjoyable picture.

The plot, of course, required concert music for the final conflagration, and Herrmann obliged by composing the Concerto Macabre for Piano and Orchestra. It's a twelve minute stand alone piece that has been recorded several times. The best performance is, I think, by Spanish pianist Joaquín Achúcarro on the RCA disc The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann.  Right now I'm listening to the opening bars as played by Philip Fowke on the Naxos disc Piano Concertos from the Movies (Naxos 8.554323).

In the film, as the fire takes hold of the concert hall, the members of the orchestra desert their instruments whilst Bone plays on like Nero in burning Rome. Herrmann makes the orchestra fall silent for the final twenty eight bars (or two minutes) and allows the maddened pianist to bring the piece to an end with a series of dark chords that suggest a irrevocable descent into madness. The scene - and, in particular, the music - caught the imagination of a fifteen-year-old boy in the audience and he wrote a fan letter to Herrmann. His name was Stephen Sondheim. His own Gothic composition Sweeny Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street owes something to Herrmann's "poetic morbidities."

The score for Hangover Square has recently been re-recorded on the Chandos label, but I don't have this disc. I do have a thirty three minute selection of the original soundtrack on The Marvellous Film World of Bernard Herrmann Volume 2 (Tsunami TCI 0610), but the quality is poor and I don't listen to it that often. Apart from the concerto, the score has its fair share of violent and dissonant sounds. The piercing piccolo screeches that accompany the murder sequences look forward to the shrieking violins of Psycho, and are about as pleasant to listen to as fingernails scraping down a chalkboard.