Get Nicked by The Sweeney!

"Get your trousers on, you're nicked!" The Sweeney's John Thaw and Dennis Waterman

My wife and I just finished binge-watching all 53 episodes of The Sweeney on Britbox and loved its dated, politically incorrect (but clearly reflective of its time) vibe and colorful Cockney rhyming slang. In fact, the program title itself derives from Cockney rhyming slang, in which the expression “Sweeney Todd” rhymes with (and stands for) “Flying Squad” - the elite branch of the Metropolitan Police Service specializing in combating armed robbery and violent crime within metropolitan London. The Sweeney originally aired on ITV between 1975 and 1978 and starred future Inspector Morse icon John Thaw as Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Dennis Waterman (Up the Junction, New Tricks) as Detective Sergeant George Carter (hmm...Regan and Carter: a wink at our future Presidents?). Such was its popularity in the UK that it got name-checked by a number of UK pop stars of the time, most notably by Squeeze in "Cool For Cats" ("The Sweeney's doing 90/'Cos they've got the word to go/They get a gang of villains/In a shed up at Heathrow"). It also spawned two theatrically-released feature film spin-offs, Sweeney! (1977) and Sweeney 2 (1978), both of which are available for insatiable Sweeney fans  - and newbie converts alike - to stream through Kanopy using their Pratt library card. (In 2012, a movie reboot of The Sweeney starring Ray Winstone as Regan and rapper Plan B (Ben Drew) as Carter was released; the less said about that iteration, the better.)

In Sweeney! (1977), Detective Inspector Regan and Detective Sergeant Carter accidentally get involved in a gigantic top-level plot against the British government when the mistress of a cabinet minister is found dead of an apparent overdose. As the bodies start to pile up in London’s streets, Regan and Carter find themselves embroiled in a murderous international conspiracy involving call girls, multinational oil companies and cold-blooded bureaucrats. Barry Foster (famous for his role as grim killer Roger Rusk in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy) and Ian Banne (The Offense) co-star in this hard-hitting big screen adaptation of the television series. Watch the Sweeney! trailer here.

In Sweeney 2, Regan and Carter are back on the trail of a particularly tough and ruthless gang of bank robbers who always use a gold-plated sawn-off shotgun during their raids. Following a trail of dead bodies, wrecked cars, a mad bomber and bundles of banknotes all the way from London to the isle of Malta, the two detectives ruthlessly pursue their quarry, culminating in a final raid that becomes a desperate shotgun massacre. Veteran character actor Denholm Elliott (A Room With a View, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Ken Hutchison (Ladyhawke) co-star. Watch the Sweeney 2 trailer here.

Influenced by the action-packed American TV programs of the time, The Sweeney represented a cultural shift in British crime series. Just as the hard-boiled pulp fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett liberated the classic “cozy mystery” from well-groomed detectives solving locked-room murders over tea and biscuits, The Sweeney gave crime back to its rightful owners: nasty villains hard enough to roller-skate on and the equally rough-and-tough coppers out to nick them. It was everything Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot weren’t: rude, crude and brutally realistic. And its protagonists weren’t the heroic good guys in white hats; they were flawed human beings, with the same insecurities and problems we all have. Indeed, Regan and Carter are shown inhabiting the same sleazy world as the criminals they chase, mixing with low-life “snouts” to obtain their leads, and speaking the same vernacular. In that sense, it laid the groundwork for future crime series like Prime Suspect and Luther, with a direct line from John Thaw’s inspector Regan to Philip Glenister’s DCI Gene Hunt on Life On Mars. And the action - car chases with screaming tires, explosive crashes and bare-fisted hand-to-hand fighting - only added to the sense that this wasn’t your dad’s quaint police procedural.

On a sociological level, it’s fun to observe the hideous clothes (wide collars and ties, bell-bottom flared trousers) and dated hairstyles of the series, not to mention the American-styled muscle cars of the “Flying Squad.” Star John Thaw looks like he's 50, even though he's only in his early 30s, and his violent, boozing Regan is as far from the opera-loving Inspector Morse (not to mention sensitive young Endeavor Morse) as conceivable; and Dennis Waterman’s sideburns make him look like a Slade glam music fan, while his Cockney-accented repartee with Thaw (“If Freud had met her, he’d a ditched his couch and become a tattoo artist!”) was a highlight of the series. Indeed, dialogue was as important to The Sweeney as action and many of Regan's best lines have become famous, none more so than “Get your trousers on, you’re nicked!”

Looked at today, with widespread law enforcement abuses headlining the daily news, the insensitive language and extreme violence depicted in The Sweeney clearly dates it. But though Regan and Carter sometimes bent the rules in their pursuit of justice, they were basically honest cops who abhorred corruption and hypocrisy. And The Sweeney’s historical significance as a catalyst for change across the entire police drama genre (an effect we take for granted in virtually every contemporary crime series) makes these films, taken in perspective, well worth a look. 

As a DVD Savant critic described the series: "Some points of reference for those who still haven't a clue what the series was about? If you could imagine teaming Bobby Crocker [Kojak detective] with Ken 'Hutch' Hutchinson [the rough-hewn Scots character actor of The Bill and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs fame], giving them both a couple of extra lessons in Harry Callahan-style insubordination/attitude and a spoonful of the kind of political incorrectness that featured in most ‘70s cop/action features, before flying them out to investigate the events that unfolded in Mike Hodges's Get Carter....you'd be almost on the right track."

Remembering film pioneer Earl Cameron

(August 8, 1917-July 3, 2020)

Earl Cameron receiving his 2009 Commander of British Empire medal

Earl Cameron, the Bermuda-born British actor who broke through the “color barrier” to become one of the first significant black performers in British cinema, died Friday, July 3, aged 102 (just a month shy of 103!). Cameron made his acting debut in director Basil Dearden’s Pool of London, a 1951 film about a diamond robbery set in a post-war London of racial prejudice that you can stream for free through Kanopy using your Enoch Pratt library card.

Cameron won critical acclaim for his performance in Pool of London as a sailor who unwittingly becomes involved with a smuggling plot. It was considered the first major role for a black actor in mainstream British cinema and was also the first British film to depict an interracial romantic relationship: Cameron’s West Indian seaman Johnny Lambert meets and falls in love with white theater ticket taker Pat (Susan Shaw of It Always Rains On Sunday, also available to stream through Kanopy), and the two share an instant chemistry and mutual affection as they have dinner and spend a tender, innocent day walking the streets of London.

Susan Shaw and Earl Cameron in “Pool of London” (1951)

But while Pat’s carefree attitude to their relationship shows a naivety about the miscegenation taboos of the times, Johnny can see clearly that their “friendship” cannot survive contemporary society’s racial divide.  In a key scene in the film, Johnny and Pat have the following conversation that sums up their plight:

Johnny: “When you’re at the wheel of a ship at night, you think about a lot of things you don’t understand. You wonder why one man’s born white and another isn’t. And how about God himself; what color is he? And the stars seem so close and the world so small in comparison with all the other worlds above you, it doesn’t seem to matter so much how we were born.”
Pat: “It doesn’t matter.”
Johnny: “It does, you know.”

Ealing Studios, the film’s producers, also made sure Pat and Johnny’s romance was doomed: no physical intimacy such as kissing or embracing transpired between the lovestruck couple, though the film’s narrative seems to cry out for it. Such were the social mores of the day and Cameron knew them well. Fortunately for him, life didn’t imitate art, for in real life both his wives, Audrey and Barbara, were white. But British cinema wasn’t quite ready for its first black star. It would take another five years before he landed another major role in Terence Young’s Safari (1956), followed up by an acclaimed performance in Roy Ward Baker’s Flame in the Streets (1961).

“I would still say it’s the best part I’ve had in films,” Cameron told historians Stephen Bourne and Richard Dacre, reflecting on Pool  of London in 1997. “The amount of fan mail I received was amazing. People felt sorry for me. They thought I really was that lonely Jamaican guy wandering around London looking for friends!”

But like the characters he played, Cameron had a remarkable tenacity and would go on to make many more films over the course of his long career, for which he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2009. His major big screen credits include Flame in the Streets (1961), Thunderball (1965), The Interpreter (2005) and Inception (2010); on television he was one of the first black actors to appear on Doctor Who (his performance as Williams in 1966’s “The Tenth Planet" serial also made him the first black actor to play an astronaut onscreen) and appeared in a number of 1960s Patrick McGoohan series (Danger Man, Secret Agent Man, The Prisoner), as well as the 1996 TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. As critic Ashley Clark wrote during a 2017 British Film Institute “Black Star” retrospective of Cameron’s career:

“ ...to watch a young Cameron in Pool of London and Flame in the Streets is to see an actor who possesses a dramatic force comparable to Cameron’s friend, fellow Caribbean, and co-star (in the 1973 film A Warm December) Sidney Poitier: a handsome, composed, and commanding screen presence possessed of palpable intensity, dignity, and intelligence. It is also to imagine a poignant alternative history — one where that brilliance was fully recognized, amplified, and celebrated.” 

Despite the studio limitations imposed on Pool of London, director Basil Dearden never shied away from the taboo issues of race and sexuality, treating the subjects with a dignity unusual for the times. 1959’s Sapphire, made in the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill riots and once again featuring Cameron (this time as Dr. Robbins, a dignified black professional well aware of the burden of his color) addressed “racial passing” as well as the prejudice against Commonwealth immigrants in 1950s London. And 1961’s Victim sympathetically tackled homosexuality, which until 1967 was illegal in the UK and caused its practicioners to live in fear of being imprisoned, blackmailed or blacklisted. These latter two titles are part of  Basil Dearden’s London Underground, a four-film DVD box set that you can check out from Pratt using our Sidewalk Service pickup or Books-by-Mail services.

Earl Cameron’s final scene as Dr. Robbins in Sapphire offers perhaps the best summation of his long career as a black actor overcoming racial prejudice in his life and chosen profession. “I see all kinds of sickness in my practice...I’ve never yet seen the kind you can cure in a day.”  

Earl Cameron with Nigel Patrick in "Sapphire" (1959)

Related links:

Earl Cameron discusses his career in this YouTube interview.