It's a play on Hanover Square in London, where, apparently, there were many drinking establishments. It's also still another variety of amnesia. This time the victim knows he's lost his memory, but his friends and relatives don't notice.
George Harvey Bone, a composer played by the immense (300 lb) and immensely talented Laird Cregar, experiences what he calls "moods" where he can't remember what he did or where he did it. It being a film noir, what he does is kill people. An elderly Scottish antique dealer for one, and Netta Longdon, a wicked exploitative chantoosie (Linda Darnell at her best), who's been playing Bone for a sucker. But he doesn't remember, so it's not his responsibility, say some. In the event, he carries Netta's newly-strangled body to the top of a Guy Fawkes bonfire and then returns to his own house where, melodramatically seated at his piano and playing his concerto while fire blazes around him, he's burned to death. As far as I can tell, he never does discover that he's a murderer when he's "in the mood." Nor must he be punished by the law; the fire does the job. "It's better this way" says George Sanders, Bone's ineffectual psychologist.
Fascinating addendum: Linda Darnell, consumed by fire in this movie, died twenty years later in a house fire in Glenview, Illinois. (Laird Cregar, 31, died of a heart attack after Hangover Square was completed but before it was released.)
Is it a good film? It's fascinating for sure and there are many good scary scenes, but the plot is so compromised by the inexplicable designer amnesia that it's hard to embrace, hard to recommend.
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