The Curse of Ham
I love Laird Cregar with an almost sexual passion. The standard biographical stuff is necessary and heartbreaking: a fat character actor seemingly destined to occupy, with honour, the Sidney Greenstreet position in noirs, this natural heavy was also a fine light comedian, hired by Lubitsch to play Satan in Heaven Can Wait. But he longed to be a leading man, and embarked on crash diets out of a mad desire to become “slender as a sapling,” a misguided aim given the nature of his skills. And it killed him.
Fat or thin, Cregar was unlikely ever to have been another Robert Taylor. He played Jack the Ripper to acclaim in The Lodger, then lost the weight to play George Harvey Bone, the schizophrenic, lovelorn murderer of Patrick Hamilton’s wonderful novel Hangover Square (subtitled A Tale of Darkest Earl’s Court). Bone is described as heavyset in the book, so it was perverse of Cregar to slim for the part, and then to go on suspension at 20th Century Fox in protest at the fact that the screenplay was too unlike the source book. But perversity was this actor’s life’s blood.
He’s a much more versatile player than his reputation (fat ham) suggests. His voice could be booming – as extrovert baddies, titans of depravity in Tyrone Power adventures – or it could shrink to a nasal whine – the morbid detective/stalker Cornell in I Wake Up Screaming. True, his perfs are always large, but they’re rarely broad. He wants his characterisations to be towering and overwhelming, but he burrows down into the specifics. He’s not above actors’ tricks; indeed, he subsists on them, but he transmutes such base metal into gold.
Nobody actually wakes up screaming in I Wake Up Screaming, but Victor Mature does awaken to find Cregar slouched in an armchair, staring at him in a blinking neon/Venetian blind glow, having silently admitted himself, unauthorised, during the night: if Mature doesn’t scream now, he never will. And then Cregar delivers his half of the scene while roaming about the room, hunting for clues. Picking up a stray hair and folding it lovingly in a notebook. Just as Mature slams the door in his face, he strikes a match on the doorframe with a sudden violent energy startling in such a sullen lump of a character. It’s huge, melodramatic, absurd and wonderful. You want to applaud.
His Satan is rather adorable. “No one can do comedy who does not have a circus going on in his head,” declared director Lubitsch, and Cregar clearly was a three-ring man with sideshows, seedy concession stands and a noisy, sweltering audience. But his Satan is sweet, delicate, a gentleman to his immaculately manicured fingertips. When he presses a button on his majestic, studio boss desk, and consigns an over-familiar old lady down a trapdoor to the furnace, it’s done with an air of mournful apology and consideration for the sensibilities of the fellow who witnesses the act. “Some things are best left to memory,” he says.
Cregar isn’t corny, but he can certainly be camp. His villain Gates in This Gun For Hire lingers over melted sundaes and gorges on peppermints, while leering at legs, claims a horror of violence and recoils at the mention catgut: “That’s a horrible word!” But he’s very interested to know how assassin Alan Ladd feels when he kills: his tongue lolls about in his mouth, pushing at his cheek in fellatelic excitement. When Ladd snaps, “I feel fine,” he abruptly looks away, sucking his spoon, overcome with either fear or arousal or both. Much of this is in the script (by Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett: quite a roomful), but Cregar invigorates it with his shamelessness, his exuberance, his exultation in the possibilities of drama. Why hold the mirror up to life when you can hold it up to yourself and make faces at it?
By David Cairns