Past Misdeeds: The Squeeze (1977)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Not to be confused with the surprising number of other films called The Squeeze.

Former Scotland Yard inspector Jim Naboth (Stacy Keach) has just gotten out of what clearly wasn't the first rehab stay after a drunken binge, taken his first drink again, and returned home to his two kids who inexplicably are still in his custody, when he learns from her second husband Foreman (Edward Fox) that his ex-wife Jill (Carol White) and her and Foreman's little daughter Christine (Alison Portes) have disappeared.

Both have been kidnapped by Keith (David Hemmings) and other henchmen of Irish would-be upper class gangster Vic (Stephen Boyd) to use them to blackmail Foreman. Foreman, you see, owns a bank (I think, he may also just own the security business), and Vic and his men are planning to use him to get into one of his security vans that should be loaded with about a million pound sterling, which is nothing to sneeze at by late 70s standards.

Accompanied by his thief friend Teddy (Freddie Starr) - who attempts to keep the ex-cop sober and out of trouble with particular enthusiasm - Naboth drunkenly stumbles through the seedy parts of London looking for Jill and Christine. Naboth's always just one step from one kind of humiliation or the other, but also a surprisingly effective investigator when the alcohol haze gets a bit thinner.

If you ask me, then Michael Apted's The Squeeze is one of the unsung greats of British crime cinema of the 70s. It's not quite on the level of Get Carter or The Long Good Friday, but not quite being one of the best films of its era and genre doesn't mean it's not pretty fantastic.

At this point in his career, before a curious and rough Hollywood career that contains a Bond movie as well as Oscar-baiting melodramas, Apted had predominantly worked for British television with quite a few TV movies under his belt, and one can't help but suspect that he enjoyed going all out with the grime and the violence for the cinema in The Squeeze. Stylistically, Apted's film opts for grainy hyper-realism, showing London as a cesspool of ugliness and poverty that is from time to time lit up by acts of random human kindness. There's a lot of nervy hand camera work (that still is steadier than most of the footage you'd find in a POV horror film from our decade), grain, and locations of a particular shade of grey - with a bit of cheaply garish colour from time to time - on display that make the mood of seediness particularly thick. On the other hand, Apted doesn't lay it on too thick: The Squeeze is a film taking place in locations that are ugly and quite unpleasant yet still feel believably lived in.

It seems like a somewhat curious casting decision to find someone as American as Stacy Keach playing a former London copper, and Keach's ropey accent that seems to come and go as it pleases sure doesn't help there, but once you've watched his performance here for a quarter of an hour or so, you start to ignore the accent, and become impressed by the raw truthfulness of Keach's performance. The actor is clearly channelling some of his own experiences here, and portrays Naboth's vulnerability, his loss of dignity, his lack of responsibility in all their ugliness without ever turning him into a caricature. Paradoxically, Keach's portrayal of Naboth's lack of dignity is so strong it effectively returns that dignity to the character.

The rest of the cast is equally strong, particularly comedian Freddie Starr in a not at all comical role, and Carol White going through some of the film's theoretically most exploitative moments and turning them into the exact opposite.

There is - obviously - a strong gay undercurrent in the relationship between Starr's Teddy and Keach's Naboth (just look at the scenes of Teddy interrupting Keach and his nurse girlfriend during sex), yet the film resists either turning Teddy into a tragic gay or making fun of him. I read this as a deeply ingrained respect for human difference you don't generally expect to find in a violent crime movie, or at least as an expression of the film's disinterest in judging its characters.

That unwillingness of judging characters for anything is particularly interesting and uncommon in a film that pulls as few punches as The Squeeze does. This is a film where violence is inelegant, undignified, and disgusting, and that doesn't flinch from showing even a seemingly sane gangster like Hemmings's Keith having no trouble at all being cruel to children, pressing a woman into a forced striptease with following rape (or at least non-consensual sex, depending on your interpretation of the word), nor with anything else that helps him keep his feeling of control. Consequently, the "bad guys" should be really easy to hate, but Apted's direction doesn't seem interested at all in making the audience hate them or anyone else, really. At the same time, the director clearly has just as little interest in wallowing in the characters' base actions as he in excusing them. He shows them but he sure as hell does neither enjoy them nor want his audience to (and the film's main sympathies in these scenes are always with the victims). It's just that not showing the disgusting details would be dishonest, and The Squeeze is a film all about being truthful to its audience, at least as far as it understands the truth.


At the same time, Apted also avoids the feeling of nihilism that could very easily follow this approach. There's simply too much compassion in every shot and every scene of The Squeeze to call it a nihilist film.

Body Bags (1993)

The Showtime TV movie Body Bags is a horror anthology in the classic style, featuring three independent stories, the first two directed by the great John Carpenter, the other one by the sometimes great Tobe Hooper, connected by a framing device in which Carpenter himself gives a somewhat dead looking guy the film credits as The Coroner and presents the tales cracking jokes that’ll make the Crypt Keeper look funny.

Tale number one, “The Gas Station”, concerns the misadventures of psych student Anne (Alex Datcher) working the night shift at the titular establishment. She has to cope with bad luck, strange customers, and a serial killer. It is the simplest story of the three, the sort of thing Carpenter could probably direct in his sleep, but it’s made with the slick hand of an old pro, and while it certainly isn’t Halloween, it is a fun way to get the audience in the right mood for the rest of the film.

The second segment, “Hair”, is the mandatory comedy bit, but unlike most comedy segments of horror anthologies, it is indeed funny. It tells the sad and tragic tale of one Richard Coberts (Stacy Keach), whose once copious mane of hair has begun to thin considerably – so much so that the word “bald” is beginning to rear its ugly head. Desperation and ridiculous attempts at solving his problem culminate in Richard following a TV advert into the hands of the conspicuously named Dr. Lock (David Warner) and his lovely assistant (Debbie Harry) whose treatment does indeed work wonders on Richard’s head. Unfortunately, it might not exactly be hair he now has to cope with.

“Hair” is probably the high point in Carpenter’s career as a comedy director, at least in so far as it is indeed funny (though how funny for those of you who aren’t middle-aged guys losing their hair like Richard and I, I’m not sure), has a friendly satirical edge and features a wonderful turn by Keach that gets the desperate ridiculousness of getting upset over hair, and the way this stands in for the fear of mortality absolutely right, while being very funny indeed.

Tobe Hooper’s segment “Eye” tells the tale of minor league baseball pro Brent Matthews (Mark Hamill). Mark’s always just on the verge of breaking into the majors (with probably his latest and last chance coming up soon), but things never quite go his way. At least, he’s happily married to Cathy (Twiggy), and seems a pleasantly down to earth guy. When he loses an eye in an accident, he agrees to undergo an experimental full eye transplant. As we all know, that sort of thing always leads to the new eye owner either seeing dead people or terrible visions from the life of the former eye bearer. It’s the latter in Brent’s case, with the added complication that he’s also increasingly being infected by quite a bit of the former owner’s mental state. That’s particularly unfortunate since the man in question was a serial killer and necrophiliac. Even worse, Cathy looks rather a lot like the killer’s type.

This last story is a properly nasty bit of short horror, with terrible things happening to perfectly nice people for no good reason whatsoever. Hooper uses his penchant for the grotesque particularly well in a handful of daytime visions that show the worst of the killer’s exploits, while Hamill portrays Brent’s shift from good man and husband to insane monster with just the right amount of scenery chewing. There’s also a truly upsetting scene in which Brent sexually assaults his wife while fantasizing about her being a corpse that makes this final episode an escalation from the EC fun of the Carpenter stories and the framing device into the realms of horror that hits a bit closer to home, and a bit deeper. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, it’s just not the typical way horror anthologies work.


As a whole, Body Bags is a fine example of its form, with Carpenter and Hooper showing themselves from their good sides, featuring a bunch of great performances, more gore and violence than you’d probably expect after hearing of its provenance as a cable TV movie, and a cornucopia of horror actors and directors in roles minor and somewhat larger.

In short: The Long Riders (1980)

There’s something peculiar about the fact that various groups of what most certainly were deeply unpleasant men of the Old American West have become folk heroes. But then, there seems to be a strain in US culture that values independence far more than any moral or ethical values. Of course, in the case of the James-Younger Gang, history did make things quite easy for folklore by involving the even more unpleasant boot of the rich and equally lawless in form of the Pinkertons on the other side, and including the taste of betrayal.

Where folklore went, Hollywood followed very early on, so Walter Hill’s film about the rise and fall of the James and the Youngers is only one particularly fine film about these dubious people among many. And a very, very fine film it is, perhaps one of the best – und certainly one of the more underrated – revisionist Westerns ever made. It’s a film that does little wrong, starting out leisurely in a tone of highly stylized authenticity - which of course isn’t authenticity at all, but a way to make the world a film takes place in feel believable and lived in by real people – that slowly but surely turns darker, culminating in the most surreal Great Northfield Minnesota Raid ever put on screen, as far as I know.

In between, the film walks the line of treating its robber heroes as its heroes without ever turning them completely into the folkloric heroes, nor treating them as mere psychopaths. The James’s and Younger’s exploits are also located in a very specific kind of post-US-Civil-War resentment of poor Southern whites towards the Union, not a place I find particularly comfortable to sympathize with (because, d’oh, slavery) but again something that adds complexity to the characters and positions them in a believable social milieu, something Hill is – to my surprise – just as adept at showing as he is at the violence and the underplayed male friendships. And even though this is quite the male dominated film, Hill also finds room to show women with agency and minds of their own; it just doesn’t help them much.

It’s a humanizing effort that is further supported by some fine acting by the collected Keachs, Carradines, and Quaids that make up its cast in what sounds like stunt casting but really does work out very fine in this case, with the various siblings playing siblings with not exactly surprising sibling chemistry. Ironically, at least for me, for once letting actual relations play relations does feel a bit strange in a movie, because I – and I do imagine I’m not the only one – have so gotten used to see siblings on my screen not looking similar at all, the film’s gesture of particular naturalism does feel weird rather than natural. Which, come to think of it, is quite a trick of Hill to play on his audience.

But then, The Long Riders does play quite a few tricks on its audience, subverting expectations and making things much more messy than they appear at first; that the film is also just a fantastic revisionist western might be one of these tricks.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,western,walter hill,david carradine,keith carradine,robert carradine,james keach,stacy keach,dennis quaid,randy quaid

On Exploder Button: The Squeeze (1977)

Did you know Michael Apted once was one hell of a director who made one of the hidden gems of UK 70s crime movies? I sure didn't until a few weeks ago, when I watched The Squeeze, and found myself confronted with a great and gritty crime movie that somehow still manages to be humanist.

I go into more detail in my column over on Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,michael apted,crime,stacy keach,david hemmings,edward fox,stephen boyd,carol white,freddie starr