Call
it Michael Apted’s sordid little secret. Not that the director of Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist and the Up television documentaries need be
ashamed of this little-seen thriller.[i]
Armed with a salty script by Minder creator
Leon Griffiths, Apted roams London’s seamy underworld with a documentarian’s
eye for vivid detail and a first-rate cast prepared to get their hands dirty.
Chief among them is Stacy Keach (virtually accent-less), playing another washed-up loser in the vein of Fat City’s Tully. Ex-cop Jim Naboth’s weakness for liquor has cost him his marriage and his job. His painful tumble down an escalator in the opening scene is a metaphor for the state of his life. Between bouts of sobriety, he is perpetually on the point of recidivism. Yet beneath the wreckage there is a decent man: father to two long-suffering boys; popular with his neighbours; doted on by a best friend, petty thief Teddy (a surprisingly low-key Freddie Starr), who is always ready with a lifeline.
Chief among them is Stacy Keach (virtually accent-less), playing another washed-up loser in the vein of Fat City’s Tully. Ex-cop Jim Naboth’s weakness for liquor has cost him his marriage and his job. His painful tumble down an escalator in the opening scene is a metaphor for the state of his life. Between bouts of sobriety, he is perpetually on the point of recidivism. Yet beneath the wreckage there is a decent man: father to two long-suffering boys; popular with his neighbours; doted on by a best friend, petty thief Teddy (a surprisingly low-key Freddie Starr), who is always ready with a lifeline.
During
one moment of clarity, Naboth decides to intervene when his ex-wife, Jill, and
her daughter are kidnapped – brazenly, in broad daylight – and her husband, Foreman,
the owner of a security firm, forced to arrange a robbery in lieu of a ransom.
Naboth knows the perpetrators and they know him, but they don’t consider him a
credible threat. When he breaks into the home of the ringleader, Irish porn
baron Vic Smith, he is beaten, stripped naked and delivered outside his house,
in full view of gawping neighbours and mortified son. A bullet would have been
more dignified.
Even clothed, Keach plays Naboth in the raw, his flaws and vulnerabilities on open display. In the annals of Seventies British crime drama, Naboth is a very different kind of antihero from, say, the title figure in Get Carter (whose nakedness in one famous scene, augmented by a phallic shotgun, only exaggerated the character’s swagger). Nor, at the opposite end of the spectrum, does he resemble Jack Regan of The Sweeney. (The grimy realism of The Squeeze is a fairer reflection of the TV series’ strengths than its own big-screen spin-offs.) Keach rarely does arrogance or virility; he is drawn more to human failings, and Naboth reeks of them. The actor’s uninhibited, self-deprecating performance injects vitality and unpredictability into what is, on paper, the most hackneyed of roles.
Even clothed, Keach plays Naboth in the raw, his flaws and vulnerabilities on open display. In the annals of Seventies British crime drama, Naboth is a very different kind of antihero from, say, the title figure in Get Carter (whose nakedness in one famous scene, augmented by a phallic shotgun, only exaggerated the character’s swagger). Nor, at the opposite end of the spectrum, does he resemble Jack Regan of The Sweeney. (The grimy realism of The Squeeze is a fairer reflection of the TV series’ strengths than its own big-screen spin-offs.) Keach rarely does arrogance or virility; he is drawn more to human failings, and Naboth reeks of them. The actor’s uninhibited, self-deprecating performance injects vitality and unpredictability into what is, on paper, the most hackneyed of roles.
Even on the eve of the robbery, when Naboth ought to be at his sharpest, Teddy finds him under a flyover among hordes of winos, paralytic. It’s a wonder to see him scrubbed and suited for his final reckoning with the gangsters. This lengthy sequence checks the momentum of the kidnap plot, but this seems deliberate; the story is filtered through Naboth’s alcoholic fog, which takes time to dispel. Apted privileges people and place over pulse-pounding thrills.
Not that the director fights shy of generic business. The kidnapping, led by a suave but sadistic David Hemmings, is shot almost guerrilla-style in a bustling Battersea Park. The build-up to the robbery drips with tension, sustained by David Hentschel’s swirling synths and released by Smith blasting a policeman off his motorbike. There is an especially gruelling scene in which Jill is forced to perform a striptease for her captors, in a cramped room heavy with sweat and oppression. The camera’s unrelenting focus on Jill’s rhythmic gyrations challenges male viewers to abjure the experience rather than enjoy it. Carol White’s brave attempt to turn her character’s humiliation to defiance is painful to watch – even while being objectified, fully naked, she tries to wrest back control of her sexuality, to turn its power against her tormentors. It doesn’t quite work, but makes for a complex and troubling scene.
Apted’s gutter-level perspective of Seventies London is profoundly unflattering. Lewiston’s camera lingers on the grey-brown tawdriness of grotty watering holes, grim council estates and dingy massage parlours. It is a city of derelict factories and derelict lives, sorely in need of the regeneration envisioned by Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday. The gangsters here similarly wear the facade of businessmen, but their outlook is narrower – no wider than the gauge of Smith’s double-barrelled shotgun.
Naboth,
at least, ends the film refreshed, cup of tea in hand rather than the hard
stuff.
Kevin Grant
[i]
The Squeeze had only a limited cinema
release in 1977 and is rarely – if ever – shown on television, where I first
saw it decades ago. It is currently available on DVD only via Warner’s
burn-to-order service
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