In this moody gaslight noir, Laird Cregar, one of the most memorable character actors of the forties, had his first—and final—starring role as the talented but tortured George Harvey Bone. A blackout alcoholic in Patrick Hamilton’s source novel, the studio changed the character to better suit Cregar’s creepy image, making him a classical composer driven by the sounds in his head to create majestic concertos—and beautiful corpses. Linda Darnell plays the alluring but conniving singer who inspires his popular success and his murderous rages, while sleek and sophisticated George Sanders suspects Bone’s sinister secret. Joseph LaShelle’s cinematography is a visual feast, and Bernard Herrmann’s extraordinary “Concerto Macabre,” centerpiece of the film’s incendiary climax, is one of the most thrilling works he composed for the cinema. Cregar never got to see his greatest performance, dying prior to the film’s release at the age of thirty-one.