The Cat and the Canary (1978)

The 1920s. A murder of prospective heirs descend on a somewhat creepy, and definitely creaky, old mansion, to hear the reading of the will of one Cyrus West (Wilfried Hyde-White). In a peculiar turn of events, the old man does the reading himself, via a filmed message that doesn’t just contain the will but also some rather rude remarks about his family, bastards all (or most of them, anyway), he says.

Not surprisingly, the will is about as peculiar as its presentation, seeing as it shows a curious fixation on the mental stability of the heir. Should the chosen heir to judged mentally unstable, the next heir is going to inherit; should that one botch their SAN test as well, it’s the next in line, and so on.

So one isn’t quite sure if one should congratulate West’s chosen victim, ahem, heir, Allison Crosby (Wendy Hiller) for winning the heir lottery, or simply suggest to her to run as quickly as she can.

Alas, running is out of the question in any case, for on the night of the reading of the will, the family is going to be stranded in the old dark house anyway, and soon, curious things begin happening. There’s the curious case of the suddenly appearing local psychiatrist (Edward Fox) on the armed hunt for a supposedly homicidal maniac who believes himself to be a cat; the curious case of the disappearing lawyer; and the many curious cases of the disfigured creep only Allison ever sees. Why, it’s enough to drive a woman mad.

I have no idea why the greatest of the arthouse porn directors Radley Metzger added another entry to the list of adaptations of this most archetypal of all old dark house stage plays; I have even less of an idea how he managed to acquire a cast that also features Honor Blackman, Michael Callan, and Olivia Hussey (among others) for what is clearly a pretty low budget affair.

What I can say is that he managed to turn out a very interesting (in the good meaning of that descriptor) version of the tale. A peculiar one, as well, for The Cat’s most obvious feature is its tendency to fluctuate between two very different tones – about half of the film is very much in keeping with the old-fashioned creakiness of its material (and of the house its plot takes place in), an old-fashionedly staged mystery comedy that might have been done exactly this way in the 30s or 40s. Its other half, on the other hand, seems to be unable to help itself from dragging the material to the borders of sleaze and exploitation cinema very typical of the late 70s; it never quite gets outrageous, but there are suggestions of what you’d have lamely termed “alternative lifestyles” when this was made and hints of outright perversion the old creaky stage play would never have dared even consider.

This latter element never becomes quite as explicit as in a giallo – which Metzger must have been influenced by – yet you never have the impression the film is squeamish. Rather, it feels to me as if part of Metzger’s approach here is meant as a comment on the fluidity of social mores over time, without wanting to quite make fun of the more stuck-up morals of the past (and, alas, sometimes the future) too much, lest the future will do the same to him.

Much of what makes the film as entertaining as it is – apart from some excellently timed jokes like West’s incredible video message and effective old-fashioned, creaky suspense – is in the tension between the very old-fashioned material and the idea of modernity used at the time when this film was made, a feeling of a movie that manages to look at the past and its own time with a degree of ironic distance, but also of sympathy.

So, apparently, I do have an idea of why Metzger might have chosen exactly this material.

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.

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.

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