The passing this week of the wonderful character actor and roughhewn leading man Stacy Keach filled the Internet with tributes and appreciations.

Film buffs far and wide, myself included, sang his praises for the classics on his resume — “Fat City,’ “The Long Riders,” “Nebraska,” TV’s “Mike Hammer,” “Hemingway,” and funny turns on everything from “Titus” to “Two and a Half Men” and “30Rock.”

More than one fan “discovered” Keach’s gritty Aussie road picture “Road Games,” which I remember seeing and reviewing for the public radio station in Kodiak, Alaska, where I worked after college. But a couple gave a hard pitch for “The Squeeze,” a 1977 thriller which Keach starred in and Michael Apted directed.

That one took me aback. I’ve been a Keach and Apted completist most of my movie-going life. How’d I miss this one, which a couple of Blue Sky fans insisted was on a par with the ’70s Michael Caine underworld classic “Get Carter,” directed by Mike Hodges?

Hunting it down, I have to say that A) “Squeeze” isn’t “Get Carter” and B) it’s not on a par with Keach’s Top Five — “The Long Riders,” “Fat City,” “Nebraska,” “The New Centurions” and “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.”

“Squeeze” is a solid if somewhat leaky pulp thriller based on pulp fiction about an alcoholic ex-cop dragged into tracking down his kidnapped ex-wife by the man who lured her away and married her.

Richard Harris was supposed to star in it. Keach was summoned to Blighty to take the role. And let’s just say this veteran Shakespearean actor’s indifferent stab at a British accent wouldn’t have gotten him past many casting directors were he not enough of a “name” to get the film financed and in production.

The “leaky” bit is a plot that has one muttering, “Wait, what? How’d he get there? Who arranged this? What’d they leave out?”

But Keach, playing a cliched falling down, drinking-in-the-park-with-winos alcoholic, brings it all home. You feel his wooziness and smell the stink the moment he appears, staggering off The Tube in the wee hours.

As an actor who had his issues with substance abuse, with a British cocaine “smuggling” arrest a few years later, the man knew addiction and helps us know it, too. Keach didn’t do rehab. The aversion therapy “tough love” depicted in one sequence here is supposedly what straightened him out after a British arrest.

But that treatment doesn’t “take” with his character.

Jim Naboth’s mate Teddy (comic Freddie Starr) fetches him from the hospital he was sent to after a drunken fallen down a Tube escalator. Teddy cannot keep Naboth from a bar. He’s not really drinking “again.” It’s just “sherry.” You know, what Niles and Frasier drink.

“I thought you were supposed to be on the dry,” Teddy pleads.

“Well, it is a DRY sherry!”

Teddy, a cabbie and petty thief who owes Naboth, figures he can sober Scotland Yard’s ex-sleuth up enough to launch a private investigation business with him. Jim dreams of chimney “rehabilitation” as a new career, in between binges and vomiting spells.

How he got custody of the two young children he had with his ex Jill is anybody’s guess. Staggering home after the hospital stay, there’s a social worker staying with the kids, keeping them alive. No mention from her about taking the children away, either.

Jill (Carol White)? She’s moved on, had another daughter with wealthy new hubbie Foreman (Edward Fox from “Day of the Jackal”). But he’s gotten the attention of the mob. And that sets up the first shocking moment in “The Squeeze.”

A well-turned-out gang led by David Hemmings (“Blow-Up,” “Barbarella”) grabs Carol, her tween daughter and the dog they’re out walking in broad daylight in a city park.

Foreman figures Jill’s ex had something to do with this “squeeze,” a kidnapping/extortion caper aimed at making Foreman steal from his own armored car company. Naboth isn’t implicated. But he damned sure gets involved, albeit haphazardly and in his own tipsy ex-cop way.

Keach lets it all hang out — literally — in nude scenes that follow the drinking that follows the beating that follows his break-in at a mobster’s (Stephen Boyd, in his next-to-last film) house.

I love the way the script has an alcoholic use his alcoholism as an excuse/alibi for how he ended up breaking in a known mob-boss’s digs.

Gunplay rarely figures in this tale of an underworld long gone. Axe handles will do. And kicking. Naboth takes his lumps, gets stripped and stinking drunk, willingly or unwillingly.

Teddy comes to the rescue, as do Naboth’s Black Caribbean expat neighbors. That’s a recognizable Apted touch, a filmmaker who saw “class” and “race” in the most tolerant terms of his day, whenever the story afforded him that chance. You’ll also recognize mugs (Alan Ford, et al.) in this picture who turn up in the decades later underworld shenanigans of Guy Ritchie and his contemporaries.

Through it all, Keach’s Naboth is a damaged bundle of addiction and ex-cop muscle memory. He takes his blows. And when it’s time for payback, no holds are barred.

Never mind the fact that we don’t believe his “Cheerio” and “bollocks” sprinkled accent for a minute.

“The Squeeze” thus never quite surpasses its “serviceable thriller” limitations. It’s a lean, gritty and wildly uneven reminder of the grey streets, drab clothes, ugly cars and “social status” craving mobsters of the Britain of the 1970s and the rules-bending coppers out to foil them.

Rating: R, graphic violence, sex, nudity, alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Stacy Keach, David Hemmings, Carol White, Edward Fox, Stephen Boyd and Freddie Starr.

Credits: Directed by Michael Apted, scripted by Leon Griffiths, based on a novel by James Tucker. A Columbia/Warner Bros. release streaming on Amazon Prime, Youtube TV, etc.

Running time: 1:43