The Squeaker is the fourteenth Edgar Wallace krimi produced in Germany and the series found its footing by then. The formula consisted of blending B-Movie shock values with fabricated suspense and knee-jerk humor, and rotating the same stock of actors embodying the exact same roles from film to film, thus creating a certain cushiness to the series, comparable to contemporary procedural crime shows on TV like CSI or NCIS. Every episode is more or less the same, and coming in, the viewer knows exactly what to expect.
What The Squeaker does differently is pushing the envelope in the cheap shock department, as the plot mercilessly exploits every red herring imaginable, coming up with twists and reversals that make no sense whatsoever but spellbind the viewer into believing that the story has purpose and moves towards a meaningful reveal.
It is telling, then, that Inspector Elfords (Heinz Drache) who traditionally should be the driving force of the film, as the main question remains “who is the squeaker”?, is completely side tracked and intervenes only sporadically, leaving ample screen time for the supporting cast and their soap-like ever changing alliances and betrayals.
The story concerns an Omar from The Wire-like outlaw who robs criminals about to engage in an exchange of illegal goods. One of those criminals, however, has unveiled the “Squeaker”’s real identity and is about to make it public but is murdered just in time with the poison of a black mamba that was stolen from the store of Frank Sutton who trades in animals, and the typical Edgar Wallace smoke-and-mirrors-fare ensues.
Kinski, again, plays more or less the proxy bad guy and his role is only of interest because he hasn’t got a single line of dialogue during the entire movie. His face, nay, his eyes, do all the work and nothing is lost in the (relative) intensity of his performance. And the way he crawls out of the shadows in one scene and shimmies over two turtles brooding on the floor is equal parts creepy and astounding.
Kinski does a lot of crawling out of hideouts, tiptoeing pressed against walls and observing from the shadows, but his dirty work is never kept a secret, which is about the only straight forward information we get from the script. When the identity of the "Sqeaker" is unveiled at the end, it is equal parts absurd and oddly satisfying, as one early shot that one mistook for simple misleading reveals to be, well, revealing. Ultimately however, the hide-and-seek of The Squeaker was pushed too far to still take it seriously. But, at this point, complaining about it would be like complaining about Horatio Cane's suave donning of his shades right before the main credits of CSI: Miami kick in.
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