Nostalgic wallows 5: Gerry Anderson

 

From gerryanderson.com / © Anderson Entertainment

 

This entry in my Nostalgic Wallows series of blogposts was inspired by something I learned recently.  Earlier this month, on September 4th, 50 years exactly had passed since the first broadcast of the first episode of the science-fiction TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77).

 

Practically every week now, anniversaries of something or other pop up that serve as depressing reminders of how long ago my youth was and how long-in-the-tooth I’m getting.  But being reminded that the first time I watched Space: 1999 – and heard the opening chords of its urgent theme tune by composer Barry Gray, which went: “DUH…! DUH…! DUH-DUH…!” – was a whole half-century ago seemed to hit particularly hard.  Anyway, I guess this is an appropriate time to pay tribute to Gerry Anderson, who was responsible for Space: 1999 and was also, perhaps, the greatest producer of children’s shows in British TV history.

 

Gerry Anderson is, of course, remembered as ‘the puppet man’.  He and his wife Sylvia began making kids’ puppet TV shows such as The Adventures of Twizzle (1957-59) and Torchy the Battery Boy (1959) in the monochrome, still-austerity-affected 1950s.  Back then, every second children’s programme on British TV seemed to feature cheap-looking wooden figures jerking around in a jungle of marionette strings: Muffin the Mule (1946-55), Flower Pot Men (1952-53), The Woodentops (1955-56) and Pinky and Perky (1957).  What set the Andersons apart from their competitors, however, was their ambition.  Their audiences might have been children and their characters might have been puppets, but that didn’t mean their shows weren’t allowed to be spectacular.  Within a decade, the Andersons refined their puppetry to an art-form – they called their techniques ‘supermarionation’ and began each show with the proud declaration, Filmed in Supermarionation – and the result was Thunderbirds (1965-66).

 

The cast of Thunderbirds might’ve been marionettes, but in all other respects this show – about the adventures of International Rescue, a late-21st century organisation run by the heroic Tracy family who used their fabulous and futuristic vehicles and gadgets to save people from crashing airliners and burning skyscrapers – was like the James Bond movies tailored for children.  As well as gadgetry, explosions and skin-of-the-teeth escapes, it had a secret island hideaway (Tracy Island), an exotic villain (The Hood), a glamorous heroine (Lady Penelope) and a brash 1960s swagger, epitomised in Barry Gray’s strident theme music.  Children’s television had never seen the likes of this before.  No wonder Anderson’s boss at ITC Entertainment, the cigar-loving impresario Lord Lew Grade, informed Anderson after seeing the first rushes of Thunderbirds that he wasn’t making TV anymore, but feature films.  Grade knew showmanship when he saw it.

 

© Century 21 Television / Associated Television / United Artists

 

Another feature that Thunderbirds shared with the best Bond movies was that while it gave international audiences the spectacle they wanted, it retained a certain wry British-ness.  The Tracy family might’ve been Americans – indeed, voicing Anderson’s shows surely kept Britain’s small community of North American actors, like Ed Bishop and Shane Rimmer, in employment for years – but for British audiences the real stars of Thunderbirds were Lady Penelope and Parker, her butler and chauffeur of her pink Rolls Royce.

 

Lady Penelope and Parker represented opposite tiers of Britain’s class system.  She was a posh glamour-puss, he was a working-class Cockney and ex-convict.  Parker was loyal but sometimes downtrodden, though at least his employer tolerated his less socially acceptable talents, which included being light-fingered and knowing how to crack a safe.  Indeed, on occasion, Parker’s talents helped her to escape from a tight corner.  Lady Penelope was famously voiced by Sylvia Anderson and it’s significant that, following their divorce in the mid-1970s, Gerry Anderson claimed that among all his puppet characters Parker (“Yes, m’ lady”) was the one he identified with most.

 

Sure, Thunderbirds looks creaky when viewed today – what film or TV show from the 1960s doesn’t?  The special effects seem slightly dinky, the puppets’ heads are too big for them to be comfortably lifelike, and their manner of walking always elicits amusement.  Any drunkard having difficulty getting from the bar to the toilets in a British pub is invariably likened to a ‘Thunderbirds puppet’.  I can only testify that, as a kid, once each episode began with that famous countdown (“Five…  Four…  Three…  Two…  One!”), that famous catchphrase (“Thunderbirds are go!”) and that pulse-quickening theme music, even a real-life crashing airliner or burning skyscraper wouldn’t have diverted my attention from the television set.

 

Anderson also knew the value of merchandising tie-ins.  It wasn’t uncommon to find myself standing with my nose pressed against a toyshop window, wishing my pocket money was lavish enough to buy all the miniature Anderson spacecraft and air-and-land vehicles displayed in front of me – Thunderbirds 1, 2 and 3, plus items from other Anderson shows like the SPV vehicle, the Interceptors, the Mobiles, Skydiver and the Eagles.  The technicians who operated the models of those spacecraft and vehicles and brought them to life in Anderson’s shows, men like Derek Meddings and Brian Johnson, later became the backbone of Britain’s movie special-effects industry.  It was thanks to Anderson’s protégés that even after the indigenous British film industry died on its arse in the late 1970s, international studios at least kept coming to Britain to make movies like the Star Wars and Alien ones because of the technical expertise there.

 

From wikipedia.org / © AP Films / ATV / ITC Entertainment

 

Along the way from The Adventures of Twizzle to Thunderbirds, the Andersons had made Supercar (1961-62), Fireball XL-5 (1962-63) and underwater extravaganza Stingray (1964-65).  Stingray is probably the second-best remembered of Anderson’s shows, partly because it was the first British children’s programme to be filmed in colour and partly because of its camp value.  It was never more camp than at the close of each episode, when the ballad Aqua Marina was sung in honour of the mute and enigmatic mermaid Marina, who helped out the Stingray crew in their battles against the despicable Aquaphibians, and on whom hero Captain Troy Tempest obviously had something of a crush.  However, it’s Anderson’s post-Thunderbirds show that I like best.

 

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68) also served up spaceships, gadgets, explosions and general spectacle.  The tone was darker, however.  It had a high body-count – well, a high puppet body-count – and the Mars-based Mysterons whom Captain Scarlet and his gang fought off in every episode were, basically, terrorists.  Spookily, their habit of taunting the ‘Earthmen’ with messages threatening death and destruction seemed to prefigure Osama Bin Laden’s mode of operation decades later.  I suspect little Osama owned all the Gerry Anderson toys when he was a kid in Riyadh in the 1960s.

 

On the other hand, Joe 90 (1968-69) was a charming kids’ espionage show with a likeable juvenile hero.  It was just unfortunate that, on account of Joe’s oversized glasses, ‘Joe 90’ became the nickname of every bespectacled child in a British playground during the next few decades.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Century 21 Productions

 

In Captain Scarlet and Joe 90, the puppets had exact human proportions – Anderson’s puppet work had achieved perfection.  Accordingly, with nowhere else to go with puppetry, Anderson moved into live action.  His 1970 show UFO was basically a remake of Captain Scarlet with human actors.   Although UFO is fondly remembered for its kitsch notions of what future fashions would look like, such as Gabrielle Drake’s silver mini-skirt and outrageous purple bob, and although it tapped into every frustrated middle manager’s secret fantasy – Commander Straker (Ed Bishop) pretended to be a film producer, but at the touch of a button his office would descend a giant lift shaft into the huge underground headquarters of anti-alien defence force SHADO, of which he was the secret boss – the show was, like Captain Scarlet, pretty bleak.

 

The aliens who attacked the earth in UFO only did so because they wanted to harvest human organs, and there was frequently a high death-toll among the guest cast.  One episode, The Psychobombs, even had the aliens brainwashing a handful of ordinary human beings and turning them into superhuman suicide bombers to take out SHADO.  Elsewhere, the harrowing episode A Question of Priorities showed how Straker’s devotion to duty indirectly caused the death of his son.

 

For a little kid like me, the show was very scary at times.  For example, an episode called The Sound of Silence had a UFO concealed in the waters of a lake amid the bucolic English countryside and an alien stalking the surrounding woodland like a serial killer.  Even the whirring, pulsing sound that emanated from the UFOs while they were in flight was sinister.  Hilariously, Independent Television (ITV), which broadcast Anderson’s shows in the UK, assumed from his past record that UFO was a children’s series and broadcast repeats of it on weekday afternoons, when kids were arriving home from primary school.  That’s how I first saw UFO – I’d come home, switch on the TV and be traumatised by it.

 

From gerryanderson.com / © ITV Studios

 

By the mid-1970s Anderson was putting together Space: 1999, which at the time was the most expensive show in TV history.  It should have given him a franchise of Star Trek proportions and made him a fortune.  It didn’t, alas, and the show’s problems were mostly self-inflicted.  Though its special effects were the best yet – some compared them to the space scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – its scripts often strayed into the metaphysical and ended up muddled and impossible-to-understand.

 

Another issue was that its leads, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, were unaccountably doleful and uninteresting.  That said, the supporting cast, consisting of Nick Tate, Prentis Hancock, Clifton Jones, Ziena Merton, Anton Philips and the excellent veteran character actor Barry Morse, were amiable.  (Sadly, Hancock and Jones died within a week of each other earlier this year.)  And the guest cast – which included Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Judy Geeson, Joan Collins, Julian Glover, Anthony Valentine, Richard Johnson, Roy Dotrice, Ian McShane, Leo McKern and the loudest man on the planet, if not in the universe, Brian Blessed – was among the best ever featured in a TV series.

 

But Space: 1999’s worst problem was that, scientifically, it was rubbish.  Its premise was that a massive explosion on the moon’s surface in 1999 caused it to be blown out of the earth’s orbit, along with a moonbase and its 300-strong crew.  From there, the runaway satellite and its reluctant passengers careered across the galaxy, managing to encounter a new solar system, and an earth-like planet, and a usually unfriendly alien civilisation, in nearly every episode.  The scientist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov condemned the show for being preposterous, but even at ten years old I didn’t need Dr Asimov to tell me that.  I knew already that outer space was rather bigger than a fairground ride and a hurtling moon wasn’t going to encounter star-systems with habitable planets as frequently as dodgem cars bumping into one another.

 

Despite its faults – the pretentious claptrap, the dour leads, the scientific nonsensicality underpinning everything – there was something weirdly compelling about the first season of Space: 1999.  Daft and pompous though much of it was, it was at least unrepentantly so and it deserved kudos for serving up, occasionally, some of the trippiest moments ever seen on British TV.  And it sometimes scared the shit out of me, even more than UFO had.  See the episodes Force of Life, where, near the end, Ian McShane was gruesomely frazzled by a laser beam before coming back to life as a blackened, tattered zombie; or Death’s Other Dominion, which climaxed with Brian Blessed suddenly decaying into a revoltingly putrefied corpse.  Most terrifying, though, was Dragon’s Domain, where the moon blundered into a graveyard of derelict spaceships.  The graveyard was really a giant web, inhabited by a nightmarish spider – a shrieking, tentacled thing that swallowed its victims, drained them and spat them out again as lifeless, desiccated husks.

 

Unwisely, Anderson hired American producer Fred Freiberger to oversee Space: 1999’s second series.  Freiberger, who was known in American TV circles as ‘the Series Killer’ thanks to his habit of taking over shows shortly before they got cancelled – he produced the last and worst season of the original Star Trek (1966-69) – dumped the things that were good about Space 1999’s first season, including Barry Gray’s theme tune and poor old Barry Morse.  It turned into a tacky, embarrassing piece of juvenilia and was duly cancelled in 1977.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Group Three Productions

 

After that, Anderson continued working but never quite captured the zeitgeist as he had in the 1960s.  Into Infinity was a 1976 special that was meant to launch another live-action science fiction series.  It had Brian Blessed, Nick Tate and Ed Bishop on board and was supposed to be based on proper astronomical knowledge of the universe – maybe Anderson was atoning for the scientific absurdities of Space 1999 – but it never got beyond the pilot stage.  In the 1980s he returned to making puppet shows and the result, Terrahawks (1983-86), was a fun but unoriginal rehash of his past glories.  Inevitably, ‘Zelda’, the intensely wrinkled villainess of Terrahawks, became another nickname in Britain, this time for ladies of a certain age who’d crumpled their skins by smoking too many cigarettes and spending too long on the sunbed.  In the 1990s he made the underwhelming live-action show Space Precinct (1994-95), while in 2005 a computer-generated version of Captain Scarlet failed to generate much interest, possibly because, at the time, it was lost amid the fuss made over the rebooting of another classic British science-fiction TV show, Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-25).

 

During this period Anderson was financially as well as creatively unlucky.  He no longer held the rights to Thunderbirds when the BBC got around to rescreening it in the early 1990s.  Presumably, when yet another generation of British children went Thunderbirds-daft, and the country’s toyshops filled up again with Thunderbirds merchandising, he didn’t profit as much from it as he should have.  Similarly, Anderson was denied any participation when a live-action film version of Thunderbirds was made in 2004.  The resulting film was directed by an American (Jonathan Frakes) and was aimed only at young children – as opposed to older children and nostalgic adults.  It was, predictably, dreadful.

 

Hopefully, before his death in 2012, Anderson was at least aware of the great affection the British public had for him and his TV shows and of how his work was stamped on the DNA of modern popular culture.  For instance, you knew immediately what Nick Park was referencing in the opening scene of Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) when, accompanied by some rousing Barry Gray-type music, his titular heroes got to the seats of their pest-control van via a series of chutes, pulleys and lifts, just as the Tracy brothers had been transported to the cockpits of the International Rescue vehicles.  Even Wallace and Gromit’s garden gnomes parted before their van’s path like the palm trees on Tracy Island used to do when Thunderbird 2 rumbled into view.

 

And Team America – World Police, the scabrous 2004 puppet movie from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the men behind South Park (1998-present), might have had as its heroes a bunch of gung-ho terrorist-blasting commandoes rather than the benign and upstanding Tracy family, and as its villain Kim Jong-Il rather than the Hood, but it was basically a grown-up version of Thunderbirds.  I just hope Gerry Anderson was able to see beyond the blood, vomit, swearing and graphic puppet-copulation scenes, get the joke and appreciate the love Parker and Stone obviously had for his work.

 

And I’ve just heard some news that also makes this post timely.  To mark the 60th anniversary of Thunderbirds, two of its 1965 episodes, Trapped in the Sky and Terror in New York City, have been remastered and released as a double-bill in British cinemas.  The Guardian review of them is here.

 

From wikipedia.org / © AP Films / Associated Television

Great British crime movies of the 1970s

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer

 

I’ve been busy lately and unable to post much on this blog.  Here’s a reposting of something that first appeared here in 2019.

 

During the 1970s, when I was a kid and when I absorbed cultural influences like a sponge, crime movies made in the United Kingdom were rarer than hen’s teeth.  That’s hardly surprising.  During that decade, the British film industry practically died on its arse.

 

And yet, as a kid, I got the impression that 1970s Britain was so crime-ridden it was dystopian.  It was a place where every bank and security van was in constant danger of being attacked by beefy men with sawn-off shotguns and stockings pulled over their heads.  Where every street was the potential scene of a violent punch-up and every road was the potential scene of a destructive car chase.  Where the police force scarcely seemed any better than the villains, its ranks composed of hard-boozing, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed thugs wearing kipper ties.  Really, at times, I must’ve been too afraid to leave my house.

 

This is because 1970s British television was awash with crime and cop shows, often violent and populated by low-life characters on both sides of the law: for example, Special Branch (1969-74), Villains (1972), New Scotland Yard (1972-74), The Sweeney (1975-78), Gangsters (1975-78), The XYY Man (1976-77), Target (1977-78), Out (1978), Hazell (1978-79) and Strangers (1978-82).  Impressionable kids like me would act out things we’d seen on TV the night before, so that at breaktimes school playgrounds reverberated with shouts of “You’re nicked, sunshine!” and “You grassed me off, you slag!” and “We’re the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had any dinner!”  My parents were happy to let me watch such programmes.  As long as I wasn’t watching that horror rubbish, which had been scientifically proven to be bad for you.

 

I suppose that many British directors, writers and actors who would have plied their trade on the big screen, if Britain’s film industry hadn’t been moribund, found themselves plying it on the small screen instead.  This helped inject some uncompromising cinematic rawness into the domestic TV crime genre.  But the cinematic counterpart of that genre seemed non-existent.

 

Well, almost non-existent.  A few crime movies did get made in 1970s Britain and these exert a fascination for me today.  Only two of them ever achieved a degree of fame and the rest are virtually forgotten, but I find all of them cherish-able.  Here are my favourites.

 

© MGM EMI

 

Get Carter (1970)

Everyone knows this 1970s British crime film, although I don’t recall it getting much attention until the 1990s, when thanks to Britpop, Damien Hirst, etc., the ‘cool Britannia’ scene took off and Get Carter’s star Michael Caine suddenly became a retro-style icon.  Ironically, Caine’s nattily dressed Jack Carter and Roy Budd’s edgy jazz score aside, there isn’t much in the Mike Hodges-directed Get Carter that feels stylish.  The drab, monochrome terraced streets of Newcastle-upon-Tyne – if the film’s premise is that Michael Caine has returned to his hometown to sort out trouble, whatever happened to Caine’s Geordie accent? – the shabby pubs, the seedy racecourses, the shit clothes and haircuts, the Neanderthal attitudes…  It’s depressing, actually.  It’s a provincial Britain where the Swinging Sixties have truly burned themselves out – if the Swinging Sixties ever reached provincial Britain in the first place.

 

Caine gets all the acting accolades for Get Carter but the film wouldn’t be what it is without its excellent supporting cast: Alun Armstrong, Britt Ekland, George Sewell, Tony Beckley and playwright and occasional actor John Osborne.  Best of all, there’s Ian Hendry as the film’s weasly villain, Eric Paice.  “Do you know,” Carter tells Paice at one point, “I’d almost forgotten what your eyes look like.  They’re still the same.  Piss-holes in the snow.”  Hendry was originally meant to play the virile Carter, but by 1970 his fondness for the booze had taken its toll and he was demoted to the secondary role of Paice, which supposedly caused tension and resentment during filming.  Thus, Caine may have enjoyed the irony of the film’s climax, which sees Carter force-feed Paice a bottle of whisky before clubbing him to death with a shotgun.

 

Villain (1971)

Villain has Richard Burton, no less, in the role of a gay, mother-fixated and paranoidly violent gang-boss who, against the counsel of wiser heads, gets himself involved in a raid on a factory’s wages van that ultimately causes his downfall.  Meanwhile, trying to stay in one piece is Ian McShane, playing a smooth but unimportant pimp who has the unenviable job of being both the object of Burton’s affections and the victim of his sadistic rages.

 

Villain also has a wonderful supporting cast – T.P. McKenna and Joss Ackland as fellow gang-bosses, Del Henney, John Hallam and (alas, the recently-departed) Tony Selby as henchmen, and Nigel Davenport and Colin Welland as the coppers doggedly trying to bring Burton to justice.  (Interestingly, McKenna, Henney and Welland all turned up in the cast of Sam Peckinpah’s troubling Straw Dogs, made the following year.)  The film suffers from having too many sub-plots, though the one where McShane helps Burton escape the law by getting a sleazy Member of Parliament who’s used his pimping services to testify for him is memorably believable and nauseating.  Played by Donald Sinden, you never hear which political party the MP belongs to, but you can guess.

 

Sitting Target (1972)

Ian McShane had to suffer some dysfunctional relationships in early 1970s British crime movies.  No sooner had he finished being Richard Burton’s lover / punchbag in Villain than he had to cope with being best friend to a psychotic Oliver Reed in Sitting Target, directed by the underrated Douglas Hickox.  With McShane in tow, Reed escapes from prison early in the film, determined to catch up with his wife Jill St John and give her what’s coming to her.  Reed doesn’t want revenge on St John, as you might expect, for her terrible performance as Tiffany Case in Diamonds are Forever (1971).  No, it’s because he’s discovered she’s betrayed him for another man.  The film’s big twist, when we find out who that other man is, isn’t altogether a surprise.

 

Sitting Target has many pleasures, including Edward Woodward playing a policeman assigned to protect St John against the marauding Ollie.  But nothing quite matches the thrilling early sequence where our two anti-heroes, plus a third convict played by the always-entertaining character actor Freddie Jones, bust out of prison in desperate, skin-of-the-teeth fashion.

 

The Offence (1972)

Okay, Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (which I’ve previously devoted a whole blog-entry to) isn’t really a crime movie.  It’s a psychological study of a macho but troubled police officer (Sean Connery) going over the edge when a hunt for a child-killer, and the provocations of the suspect the police have pulled in for questioning (Ian Bannon), push too many buttons on his damaged psyche.  But the film has that grim 1970s aesthetic that more conventional British crime movies of the period are so fond of – drab housing estates, anonymous tower blocks, serpentine pedestrian bridges.  Its supporting cast also includes strapping character actor John Hallam who, although he’s probably best remembered as Brian Blessed’s Hawkman sidekick in 1980’s Flash Gordon, was a fixture in crime movies at this time.  So, I’m putting The Offence on my list.

 

© American International Pictures

 

Hennessy (1975)

I’m also conflicted about adding Don Sharpe’s Hennessy to this list because it’s about terrorism rather than crime.  Indeed, its story of a former IRA explosive expert (Rod Steiger) who decides to destroy the British government and the Queen by blowing up the state opening of parliament after his wife and child are killed by the British Army, makes it the first movie to tackle the issue of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  However, as the final film on the list is choc-a-bloc with IRA men, and as Richard Johnson gives a lovely performance as the weary, dishevelled, cynical copper – is there any other type in British crime movies? – trying to thwart Steiger’s plan, I thought I’d give it a mention.

 

The film is admittedly patchy but it has a top-notch cast that also includes Lee Remick, Trevor Howard, Eric Porter, John Hallam (again), Patrick Stewart (bald as a coot even then) and a super-young Patsy Kensit playing Steiger’s ill-fated daughter.  The climactic scenes set in the House of Commons, involving the Queen, landed the filmmakers in hot water because they used real footage that Buckingham Palace had approved without knowing it was going to end up in a film.  Also, the film’s subject, an incredibly touchy one at the time, meant that Hennessy scarcely saw the light of day in British cinemas.

 

Brannigan (1975)

Brannigan – also directed by Douglas Hickox – is the joker in this pack.  It features John Wayne as a tough American cop who arrives in a London of bowler hats, brollies and historic landmarks that exists only in the imagination of Hollywood scriptwriters, and who then causes mayhem as he behaves like a Wild West sheriff dealing with an unruly frontier town.  This involves such memorable sequences as Wayne doing an Evel Knievel-style car stunt where he hops across Tower Bridge while it parts to let  a ship pass below.  And Wayne triggering a cowboy-style brawl in a pub near Leadenhall Market.  And Wayne roughing up a minor villain played by the cinema’s greatest Yorkshireman, Brian Glover.  (“Now would you like to try for England’s free dental care or answer my question?”)  If you’re in the wrong mood, Brannigan is the worst film ever made.  If you’re in the right mood, it’s the best one.

 

© United Artists

 

The Squeeze (1977)

Barely had John Wayne swaggered through the London underworld than another Hollywood star did too in Michael Apted’s The Squeeze – Stacy Keach, although playing an English private eye with an industrial-strength drink problem. During occasional moments of sobriety, Keach investigates the kidnapping of his ex-wife (Carol White).  She’s remarried a posh security officer (Edward Fox) tasked with overseeing the delivery of large sums of money.  Keach finds himself tangling with a kidnap gang planning to force Fox to help them mount an armed robbery.

 

The Squeeze suffers from being overlong, with too much time spent wallowing in Keach’s alcoholism. But its good points outweigh this.  I like its depiction of late 1970s multicultural London and its sympathetic portrayal of Keach’s Jamaican neighbours.  Also, Stephen Boyd (who died soon after the film’s completion, aged just 45) and David Hemmings give good turns as the villains.  Allowed to use his native Northern Irish accent for a change, Boyd disturbingly plays a well-heeled crime-lord who dotes over his own family whilst having zero empathy for the family he’s threatening to destroy with his kidnapping scheme.  Meanwhile, Hemmings is good as a pragmatic career criminal who doesn’t share his boss’s sunny optimism about things.

 

And connoisseurs of 1970s British popular culture will be fascinated to see anarchic comedian Freddie Starr play Keach’s best mate, a reformed criminal trying to make a living as a taxi driver. Indeed, such is Starr’s loyalty to Keach that he saves his neck three times at the end of the film, including by running the villains off the road in his taxi.  Starr, who died in 2019, was from all accounts an unreconstructed arsehole in real life.  Therefore, remember him this way.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures

 

Sweeney II (1978)

The greatest of all 1970s British cop shows, The Sweeney got two movie spin-offs, Sweeney! In 1977 and Sweeney II.  I don’t think Sweeney!, which involved Flying Squad heroes Jack Regan (John Thaw) and George Carter (Dennis Waterman) in an espionage plot, is much cop, but Sweeney II captures the spirit of the TV series.  It has Regan and Carter on the trail of a gang who spend most of their time living it up in Malta as wealthy British ex-pats, but who return to Britain from time to time to stage vicious, take-no-prisoners bank robberies.  As well as marrying bloody, sawn-off-shotgun-powered violence with some off-the-wall humour, Sweeney II manages to be topical too.  London’s real Metropolitan Police force was investigated for corruption in the late 1970s.  The film reflects this with the character of Regan’s commanding officer, played by the excellent Denholm Elliot, who’s facing a long stretch in prison on account of being “so bent it’s been impossible to hang his pictures straight on the office wall for the past twelve months.”

 

The Long Good Friday (1980)

Although it was released at the start of the 1980s, John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday was made in 1979 and so I’m classifying it as a 1970s film.  It definitely feels the end of a particular era with its tale of an old school London gangster (Bob Hoskins) convinced he’s about to make a mint in the brave new world of Thatcherite London where everything is up for sale to the corporations and developers.  That’s until one day when he suddenly finds himself tangling with a ruthless foe, the IRA, who make him look hopelessly out of his depth.

 

The final scene sees Hoskins become a prisoner in his own, hijacked car and get driven to his doom – an IRA man played by a youthful Pierce Brosnan snakes up from behind the front passenger seat to hold him at gunpoint.  Although Hoskins doesn’t speak, the succession of emotions that flit across his face as it dawns on him that he had it all, but now he’s blown it all, make this the most powerful moment in British crime-movie history.

 

© Black Lion Films / Handmade Films / Paramount British Pictures