A brisk adaptation of Edgar Wallace's 1905 yarn about a group of patrician social agitators using threats of shocking violence to right wrongs still only too characteristic of modern Britain a hundred years later.It meanders, and the acting by an all-male cast is merely competent for the most part (with the possible exception of Charles Croker-King hamming it up as weak link Thery), but George Ridgwell's direction keeps things ticking over nicely, and Alfred Moses's photography more than simply competent, especially his wintry location work on the streets of London (which appear rather hazy due to the heavily polluted air the era was notorious for; while the breath of one of the characters visible in what is supposedly a book-lined study betrays the fact that the scene was really shot in a corner of a poorly heated soundstage).
In his 1940 review of this film for the New York Times, critic B. R.
While it is sadly mostly forgotten today, THE FOUR JUST MEN was in its day an important and influential television series. As one of the earliest productions released by ITC, it established the formula that would lead to a string of successful, and more well remembered, programmes in the 1960s.
Somebody should help me out with this as there are absolutely no clues or mnemonics in the title page. After all, it was over 40 years ago when I saw the series.
Why is so little information given? This was a 1959 Sapphire Films television production made for ITC Entertainment.
Jack Hawkins played Ben Manfred, a member of Parliament. Andrew Keir ("Quatermas and the Pit") played his young assistant Jock.
