The Squeaker

The story was poorly cobbled together. No sense of continuity and the narrative was threadbare. Only those two brilliant actors - Alastair Sim and Robert Newton - make this film tolerable. The former plays a London journalist and the latter is a luckless jewel thief. Edgar Wallace is a very good author in his own right but he would have been appalled by the shoddy treatment of his novel, courtesy of this production!

Scotland Yard is baffled and frustrated by a jewel fence and informer known as "The Squeaker." In an effort to catch the elusive criminal they re-hire former Inspector Barrabal (Lowe), a brilliant police officer who left the force because of excessive drinking. Suspicious of a businessman who has a penchant for hiring petty ex-convicts, Barrabal goes undercover pretending to be an ex-con. The ending is a bit hokey but it did nicely wrap things up. Lowe does an adequate job as the polished and pleasant Barrabal. I best remember Lowe from the films he and Victor McLaglen did together (What Price Glory? and its sequels and Guilty as Hell). He was better in those movies. And poor Ann Todd - she has a totally thankless (and unmemorable) role in this movie. But, more than making up for this waste, are Robert Newton as a jewel thief (Larry Graeme) who knows who The Squeaker is, and Alistair Sim as the reporter (Joshua Collie) covering The Squeaker's exploits. Newton's character is one thief I kinda hoped would get away with it. As most would agree, Sim is an actor than can make every role, even a small one, memorable. To my recollection, I've only seen one other movie based on Edgar Wallace's work - The Terror. Sim is in that movie as well and is a riot. This movie may not be quite as good as that one but it never drags and holds one's interest to the end. Especially Sim and Wallace fans should see.

Maligned former Scotland Yard inspector Barrabal (Edmund Lowe) has stopped his drunken excesses and returned from Canada. He is recruited by his mentor to find the dangerous diamond fence, Frank Sutton (Sebastian Shaw).

The original British title is The Squeaker which is slang for an informer. Maybe the slang didn't travel across the Atlantic. There seems to be a few versions of this story starting with a novel and a play. I don't have much in the way of comparison. The pacing is not that great. It's a lot of slow investigating. There is a mystery to the identity, but I am never taken with the who of it all. I do like Barrabal as a character although his battle with the bottle could be elevated. At the end of the day, the squeaker doesn't sound threatening enough and this doesn't have the tension. This is fine.

Edmund Lowe has been on a four-year bender around the world after some woman dumped him. Now he's back in London, claims to be off the sauce, and ready to work for Scotland Yard again. They're desperate, because there's a fence that is forcing every crook in London to sell to him at low prices lest he tell the police what they did; that's called "squeaking" here, instead of "stooling" and has nothing to do with the fact that thief Robert Newton has been taken by the police on the Squeaker's word, escaped, and anxious to get back to singing girlfriend Tamara Desni. Neither does it refer to Ann Todd, who's engaged to businessman Sebastian Shaw.

Director William K. Howard tries some interesting camera shots towards the end. If we go by his earlier work, they are supposed to suggest psychological states, but here they don't work. I suspect that the dramatic lighting, the Dutch angles, the musical stings, and the overwrought acting make it seem too over-the-top for my taste. Still, given this is derived from an Edgar Wallace novel that was adapted for the screen four times (this is the second), that's an idiosyncratic reaction.

I just watched this tonight on channel 2 here in Australia. I can't improve on the previous chap's review (spanishflea50), as I think he summed it up very well. The only thing I can say is that I enjoyed it as well, and as I watched it, I thought this has to be have been written by Edgar Wallace (I'm a bit of a fan of his books) from the pace & style of the story to even the title, so I came to the IMDb site to find out who wrote it. Unfortunately, Edgar Wallace had been dead for ~ 4years by the time this film was released, but it is based on a novel & a screenplay he wrote for the 1930 version of the film. It would be great to be able to see the 1930 version which was actually directed by Wallace.(IMDb for 1930 -'The Squeaker')