Patrick Hamilton, creator of "Angel Street," wrote a plausible psychological murder in "Hangover Square." Hollywood's "Hangover Square" tries hard to be a big, had horror picture, and it would probably not have succumbed to maudlin melodrama in the grips of the original story.

Hamilton's idea--the common theme of a man committing crimes he cannot remember afterward--has been deprived of the psychiatric simplicity which was its saving grace.

In the book, George Harvey Bone is a frustrated newspaperman and the jealous lover of a compelling brunette girl of the streets. When Netta spurns his advances, George provides the reader with some pleasant food for bedtime though by drowning her while she gambols in the evening bath. The late Laird Cregar, Twentieth-Century Fox's discerning choice for Bone, was forced by a more puritan plot to strangle a fully-dressed wench with a strip of drapery.

Instead of permitting Bone to be a bewildered journalist, Hollywood has converted him into a moody pianist. In the embarrassingly incredible denouement, he ends his unhappy love life at the concert grand of the London Philharmonic as the building burns down around him and the flames lick his face.

"Hangover Square" is one of those motion pictures about which one feels particularly cheated, for its has a cast that is convincing and several highly professional moments. Cregar gives an intense portrayal as Bone; Linda Darnell, his high-kicking cafe dancer, repeats her role of the designing seductress in "Summer Storm" with surprising skill. There are some very effective touches in the photography: a long view of a Guy Fawkes Day bonfire, and what is unquestionably the film's most absorbing minute, a mouth-watering close-up of the Darnell cheescake. ssh