Word: cregar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Hangover Square (20th Century-Fox) is the excitingly horrid story of a large, bewildered composer named George Harvey Bone (Laird Cregar) who overworks himself into fits of amnesia. A Scotland Yard doctor (George Sanders), who is a pioneer in criminal insanity (the year is 1903), helps Bone realize that during these blank spells he may very possibly be a murderer. Bone is advised to relax. He tries to relax with a deadly poisonous music-hall beauty named Netta (Linda Darnell). When she contemptuously uses his infatuation as a means to her own evil ends, he proves the doctor was right...
Died. Laird Cregar, 28, dulcet-voiced movie behemoth; of a heart attack following an abdominal operation after dieting away 100 lbs.; in Los Angeles. Because of his size (6 ft. 3 in., 300 lbs.), Cregar had a hard time persuading Hollywood producers that he could really act, let his first picture, Hudsons' Bay, in 1940 speak for him, promptly became one of the screen's most popular portrayers of psychopathic, blood-curdling bad-men (Joan of Paris, The Lodger), had just completed, before his death, a new melodrama. Hangover Square...
...Lodger (20th Century-Fox) is a shy, vaseline-voiced neuropathologist (Laird Cregar) who begins to puzzle his landlady (Sara Allgood) when he turns the pictures in his room against the walls. They are all pictures of actresses. The landlady's niece (Merle Oberon) is also an actress; she delights the habitues of London's late 19th Century music halls with her dilutions of the cancan. She wants to divert her aunt's shy lodger too. He is diverted so violently that everybody suddenly realizes that he is Jack the Ripper, the author of the series of murders...
...Belloc Lowndes's famed thriller, The Lodger, he was less shocking, was motivated by religious mania. The screen Ripper, derived from Mrs. Lowndes's novel, is even less shocking. In part this is due to the fact that the audience knows from the start that Laird Cregar is the Ripper, so that the suspense is purely academic. In part it is due to the incredible elegance of the production and photography, which makes the whole film more memorable as a museum piece than as a hair-raiser. As a result, several excellent performances, notably those of Laird Cregar...
...Caribbean in the Golden Age of piracy. Hero is one Jamie-Boy Waring (Tyrone Power), who stands by his old captain, Henry Morgan (Laird Cregar), when Morgan decides to reform and put his buccaneering ex-mates out of business. Villain is Captain Leech (George Sanders, in a beard like a bonfire), also one of Morgan's raiders. The Black Swan is unreformed Captain Leech's pirate ship. Heroine is Lady Margaret Denby (Maureen O'Hara), daughter of Jamaica's ousted Governor...