Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square
By CHARLES TAYLOR | February 19, 2006
Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square makes almost all other hard-boiled writing seem phony. If Hamilton, who died in 1962, is remembered at all, it’s probably for the movie versions of his plays Gaslight (with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer) and Rope (filmed by Alfred Hitchcock). The difference between those chestnuts and Hangover Square (1941, just reissued by Europa Editions) is the difference between entertaining, well-constructed melodrama and the kind of work that, once you’ve read it, becomes forever after a part of your experience.
Related:
Noncombatants, The awful truth, Major and minor Billy, More
- Noncombatants
It’s perhaps understandable that what we think of as “the war novel” has become synonymous with stories set in the midst of combat.
- The awful truth
Among the signal directors of 1930s comedies — one thinks of Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, and George Cukor — Leo McCarey’s name has been largely forgotten.
- Major and minor Billy
Billy Wilder’s expansive career began in Germany at the end of the ’20s, continued briefly in Paris when he fled Hitler in 1933, and picked up in Hollywood the following year.
- Stage worthies
The roar of the greasepaint precedes that of the autumn wind this year.
- Spring break
Spring rules
- Mission Control
Like many of his films, Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control will test the limits of its audience's patience.
- Brilliant or bullshit?
You’re on a subway in an unfamiliar city, and you don’t know how you got there or where you’re going.
- Doin’ it live
The winter concert scene’s got something for everybody, from Averi to Zakir Hussain. Okay, I couldn’t resist that bit of alphabetical hackery, but it’s true.
- Hong Kong rhapsody
Ann Hui came to the Hong Kong film industry after working in television, where she made both episodic dramas and documentaries.
- Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman, who died Sunday, was one of the last of the great world filmmakers who came to fame around the mid century and changed the face of movies.
- Shape up
The “I was drunk” defense doesn’t work.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Patrick Hamilton, More
, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Patrick Hamilton, Charles Boyer, Isaiah Berlin, Less