Laird Cregar was one of studio-era Hollywood’s heavies – with a double meaning in his case, for he was a huge guy who resented what life and the film industry had to offer men like him. Cregar died aged 31 from subjecting his rotund body to a crash diet that he believed would thin him down to romantic-lead size – at exactly the moment he was heading for a different kind of stardom thanks to a pair of very sinister noir milestones by John Brahm: The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945).
Using various techniques of mainly chemical image manipulation, Stephen Broomer took excerpts from these two films and others featuring Cregar, and turned the actor’s anguish and anxieties into a black-on-grey delirium of shadows, silhouettes, spectres and blots, with operatic music adding disturbing moments of grandeur and despair. Call it materialist noir.
Trailer
This content is available after accepting the marketing cookies.
Interview
This content is available after accepting the marketing cookies.
Film details
- Country of production
- Canada
- Year
- 2021
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2021
- Length
- 64"
- Medium/Format
- DCP
You may also like this
-
Vincent van Go-Go
A pop art-driven, surrealist animation about war fears, industrial overdevelopment, and other civilisational neuroses.
-
Cinema Regained
-
-
The Village Detective: a song cycle
Four cans of badly damaged film become the starting point for a gallivanting journey through Soviet history, cinema and beyond.
-
Cinema Regained
-
-
There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse
Investigation into the reality of classical Hollywood grammar and the myths Hollywood created about itself. A work of infinite jest.
-
Cinema Regained
-