I was over at Larry's on Saturday watching HANGOVER SQUARE which starred Laird Cregar and Linda Darnell. Great film, not to be confused with Chicago's real-life Bughouse Square, up there by the Newberry Library. Cregar had lost quite a bit of weight since his previous film, THE LODGER. In that film, as he portrays Jack The Ripper, an image kept nagging at me, and it came to me as I waited on my el train home. In Richard Matheson's book I AM LEGEND, Robert Neville is always taunted by Ben Cortman, the guy he car-pooled with to the factory before the vampire plague of 1976. There's a great sense of danger when he bellows out Neville's name, and it is not until very late in the book that you realize Cortman resembled Oliver Hardy (per Matheson's own words), which put a surprise to the reader (or to me, at least), who might have thought the fellow to be more foreboding. Sadly, not a single version of I AM LEGEND shows any respect for the novel, though to be honest, the novel as is could never really be told other than on the printed page. But I finally have a fact to go with my Bud Cortman, the next time I reard I AM LEGEND, I'll be thinking of Laird Cregar. The guy kept losing weight, had two heart attacks, and died when he was 31. In HANGOVER SQUARE, his costar was Linda Darnell, who I knew had been a drinker and died in a fire. Larry looked this up after the film, and it turned out she was in Glenview, up north, at a friend's joint, and fell asleep smoking. She had died the next day at Cook County Hospital with burns over 90% of her body, her age was 41. Also waiting at the el, I wondered if perhaps one of those times I was at Illinois Research having the clinical psychologists have their way with me, Darnell might have been just down the hall in the burn ward, sometimes you could peek in on the way to the bathroom. Well, anyways, these are the kind of things I think about while standing three stories up under a full moon, the smell of rain in the air, the approaching train a small light on the horizon...
