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.
