STREAMING - John Baxter looks back at the work of scriptwriter Troy Kennedy Martin especially SWEENEY 2 (Tom Clegg, UK, 1978)

 

John Thaw and Dennis Waterman as Regan and Carter

A SELF-PRESERVATION SOCIETY.

            Screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin had occasional lighter moments but his default was the defiant conviction that “all writers get fucked over, really.”  In time, this moderated into a rueful wariness. “I trust everyone,” he said. “Just not the devil inside them.” 

            Disillusion permeated most of his work, even his pioneering TV cop series Z Cars and that archetypal comic caper film The Italian Job.  He was bitter about the changes made to his scripts for the latter and for the Clint Eastwood war comedy-adventure Kelly’s Heroes , but marginally more content with the BBC’s 1985 Edge of Darkness, which follows policeman Bob Peck as he investigates the death of his daughter in a nuclear accident. The image of Peck reverently kissing the vibrator he finds among her effects is not easily forgotten. 

            Such quirkiness enlivens many of Kennedy Martin’s screenplays, not least that for Sweeney 2 (1978), a spin-off from the TV series heand brother Ian developed and wrote to celebrate London’s toughest police unit, the Flying Squad, better known, thanks to Cockney rhyming slang (Flying Squad/Sweeney Todd), as The Sweeney. 

A visit to Malta

            The film reunited Troy with series director Tom Clegg and stars John Thaw and Dennis Waterman, playing perennially exasperated Inspector Regan and his quieter, smarter young sergeant, George Carter. A feature budget allowed a wider canvas than on the small screen, pitting the team against some bank robbers who retire after each score to Malta and the Life Styles of the Rich and Famous villa complex their crimes finance. 

            Kennedy Martin makes these men, friends from their schooldays, the vehicle of some observations about British society. Using the trappings of wealth against the system, the gang recruits Formula One drivers for its getaways and blasts into banks with gold-plated Purdey shotguns from which they’ve sawn most of the barrels. As their leader, Hill (Ken Hutchinson), points out reasonably to a terrified teller, anyone who thus mutilated so valuable a weapon would not hesitate to use it. 

The wrong end of a gold-plated Purdey

            In a kind of manifesto, the thieves spell out their belief that Britain has become fatally decadent and is fit only for plunder. Tolerated by a Maltese police force more complaisant than its London counterpart, they live in communal luxury, convinced they are creating a perfect future for their beautiful companions and adorable children. When, however, they meet their comeuppance, the wives vote unanimously to sell out. The dream was that of their husbands, and died with them.

            When not pursuing the gang, Regan and Carter have to deal with such day-to-day difficulties as their former boss (Denholm Elliott) being jailed for corruption and a CIA operative defusing a bomb in the suite of a four-star hotel. Regan uses that occasion to proposition the hotel receptionist (Georgina Hale), inviting her to visit his home, and leaving a key to let herself in. Finding him fast asleep in front of the TV, she slips the key inside his underpants, and leaves. When, later, he suggests a return visit to remove it, she defaults to receptionist mode, telling him she is not permitted to do so but can recommend some professional key-removal services not listed in the telephone book.

            Glamorous Anna Nygh has a minor role as a Formula One groupie who features in a TV commercial for rubber products, peeling off items of that material while slithering over a £40,000 Panther De Ville to the tune of Zadok the Priest, an anthem traditionally sung only at coronations. “Do you realise,” Sweeney member Jellyneck (George Warrior) says respectfully during a screening, “that every moving part of that has been machined by hand?”

The crunch of mangled metal

            The Italian Job, Edge of Darkness and The Sweeney have all been remade in recent years, invariably badly, with an emphasis on violence which overwhelms both character and narrative. There was a rectitude in the way such writers as Kennedy Martin dealt with injury and death,  an honest acknowledgment of cause and effect. It’s refreshing – if that’s the right word – to be reminded that, in the real world, punches break jaws, gunshots deafens, and car crashes end not in balletic slow motion but with a shriek of mangled metal and a pool of spilled gasoline. (Apparently there are others who agree. A recent screening of Sweeney 2 at the London Museum sold out.)

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