DVD Review: The Four Just Men
The Four Just Men was one of
ITC’s earliest stabs at a contemporary adventure series. As such, its primary
interest for fans of the genre will be a historical one. While not all the
usual suspects had a hand in the scripts and direction (Brian Clemens’ name is
noticeably absent from any credits), this series (which ran from 1959-60)
clearly established the regular episodic formula that would form the foundation
of all of ITC’s Sixties output. As I’ve written many times before, the
company’s usual setup is following a man with a slightly unusual job (
antiques dealer,
import/export agent, photojournalist, playboy, etc.), and then ignoring
whatever that job is and instead thrusting him into spy plots week after week
in exotic locations via stock footage and studio backlots. This being before
the advent of Bondmania sparked by
Dr. No and, perhaps even more relevantly,
before the British TV spy craze launched by
Danger Man and
The Avengers well
before Sean Connery ever gulped down his first on-screen vodka martini, more of
the plots are standard-issue mysteries (reflecting the private eye genre
prevalent in the previous decade)–but a surprising percentage of them are still
espionage-related. It was the Cold War,
after all. If you were telling adventure stories, you simply couldn’t escape
such plots.
Anyway, the slight twist on the
regular formula with The Four Just Men is that instead of following a single hero, we follow four of them–individually. After a pilot that serves as an
origin story and shows our four heroes all meeting in WWII–and later being
reunited in tragic circumstances and signing a pact to uphold justice in their
own ways–the leads rotate, and only one of them carries each story. Contrary to
what I’d read about this series prior to its DVD release, however, that’s not
to say that they never interact. At least one other Just Man (generally the one
from the week prior or the one who will take center stage the following week) pops
up in every episode–usually only via telephone, though. Several episodes feature all four Just Men
contributing from their respective home bases in London, Paris, New York and
Rome. This practice certainly adds to
the series’ continuity and makes it feel more whole, and not just like an
anthology show.
The leads themselves belie a
bygone era in television, when programs were targeted at adults, and not kids. In
other words, they’re all old, each one whiter and more Establishment than the
one before. There was no room in ITC’s 1959 stable for Jason King’s bouffant or
Brett Sinclair’s shaggy do and hip, trendy (maybe?) duds. The four leads are
all past-it movie stars–some more past it than others. There’s British war film
stalwart Jack Hawkins as Ben Manfred, a member of Parliament based (quite
naturally) in London. There’s Italian arthouse darling Vittorio de Sica(!!!) as
partisan resistance fighter-turned-hotelier Ricco Poccari, who operates out of
Rome. Then there are the two Americans,
ubiquitous film noir face Richard Conte as New York-based lawyer Jeff Ryder,
and veteran Hollywood actor Dan Dailey (who has the sort of lumpy,
hard-drinking face that could only become famous on black and white Forties film
stock) as Tim Collier, a hotshot journalist who works out of Paris. Each one
has a regular assistant, but the only interesting ones are Andrew Kier as Jock,
Manfred’s Scottish manservant, and–particularly!–Honor Blackman as Nicole, Tim’s
lovely French secretary. (Conte and de Sica are assigned more standard-issue
central casting beauties who leave no impression.) Blackman, looking amazingly
young, makes the most of her limited role. She is a secretary and a Girl Friday
and a love interest for Tim (although I honestly can’t imagine what she sees in
him), but she’s got a quick wit and she imbues the character with an
independent spark that prefigures her defining role as Cathy Gale on
The
Avengers. Don’t get me wrong; Nicole is no Cathy Gale (and never gets to use
judo), but she is more than just a pretty face–thanks as much to what the
actress brings as what’s on the page.
The men’s careers–and moreso their locations–define the
sorts of adventures they have to a certain degree, but of course in ITC Land
anyone can happen upon kidnappers or spies or blackmailers at any time. I found
Manfred’s episodes to generally have the most interesting plots–and the most
espionage-heavy. Tim also gets some good ones as a reporter and as an American
in Paris. Poccari’s are a mixed bag; they’re either very cool (like taking on
Charles Grey as an Arab slaver or solving one of those classic “someone
overpaid for a bad painting because it contained hidden secrets” cases) or very
lame (usually involving orphans or urchins or some variation thereupon). In
either case, he definitely brings something slightly different to the table,
being noticeably older than the others. He rarely relies on fisticuffs
(although he does rather brutally poke a henchman’s eye out with his cane!) or
gunplay, instead using his charm and keen intellect to unravel his monthly
thirty-minute mysteries. Richard Conte is not a bad performer (in fact, he
makes a more appealing lead than Dan Dailey), but his character gets all the
most boring cases. Perhaps it’s just because I live in America that I find the
American setting (mainly New York, but he also frequently travels to Small Town
USA) fairly boring compared to Rome or London or Paris, but I don’t think so. His
legal profession also tends to lead to these boring cases, shoehorning his
stories into a genre I could care less about. They play out like the worst of
Fifties American television; of the Conte episodes I watched, I can’t recommend
a single one. (Jeff gets involved in things like defending the pretty outsider
accused of poisoning from the close-knit-community-turned-angry-mob-riled-up-by-respected-community-leader
physically as well as in court, and prison riots, and New York race wars right
out of
West Side Story. Boooring.)
The most problematic aspect of the premise of
The Four Just
Men is determining which causes, exactly, are “just.” In the pilot (ostensibly
based on an Edgar Wallace book which had already spawned two feature films), the
men’s Justice-obsessed wartime commanding officer kicks the bucket and the
executor of his estate summons the four men to his castle, where he reads a
will bequeathing them a vast fund to spend towards forwarding the cause of
Justice. He also leaves it up to them to determine what constitutes “Justice.”
The
Four Just Men are famous world-wide, and generally respected. Local police
wherever they go have no problems with turning over their cases to famous
vigilantes and look on in awe when the Just Men–who report to no one but each
other–flout the word of the law in the name of the more intangible concept of
Justice. And, honestly, their idea of Justice is not really anyone’s but old,
white, rich dudes of the 1950s. For example, Manfred readily agrees to hush up
a dying Peer’s involvement in art theft (is that really Justice?), but just as
readily runs down a “rough-looking” (read: lower class) sod who seems out of place
at a snooty art auction. (This not being boundary-pushing television, the
rough-looking sod turns out to actually be involved, and not just a red
herring.) Tim is always ready to help a beautiful, wealthy blackmail victim,
even if she’s being blackmailed for something utterly reprehensible like her part
in a deadly hit-and-run accident. And, in the most egregious example of
questionable Justice, Tim decides to aid a philandering politician not only in
extricating himself from a blackmail plot, but also in covering up his
affair!
That episode is “Les Beatniques,” and it typifies not only
the show’s loose ideas of Justice at their worst, but also its complete lack of
understanding its potential young audience. A senator, played by future Felix
Leiter Cec Linder, wrote love letters to a fading actress that a trio of
leather-clad, Abe Lincoln beard-wearing, French beatniks (or “beatniques”)
have stolen for blackmail.
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” exclaims the actress.
“Not unless I can find the Martians before six o’clock,”
says Tim, his face grave.
“Martians?” queries the senator.
“Well that’s what we’re up against,” lectures Tim. “A whole
generation of weird kids that might as well come from Mars or any other planet
for all you’ll understand about them.” He manages to look really weird himself–not
to mention old and out of it–as he delivers those lines. Comparing this encounter with
the Mission:Impossible episode less than a decade later in which series star Leonard Nimoy
pretends to
be one of those weird kids is demonstrative of the change that the
television industry would undergo in the Sixties. By the end of the decade, the
networks in both Britain and America would realize that their most profitable
audience
was the younger generation—the “martians.”
Tim wouldn’t be able to pass himself off as a beatnik (not
that Nimoy pulled it off, but at least he
tried), though he does earn the
compliment from a beatnick girl that he doesn’t dance too badly for a square! At
the end of the episode (lesson time), he puts on his thick, professorial
glasses and reads some of the beats’ poetry, quickly dismissing it as “suicide
notes” and accusing them of writing off the world in their words.
One beat defends his position, arguing, “There are no
answers.”
“Well how would you know?” asks Tim sanguinely. “You’ve
never bothered to ask any questions.” Oh, snap! Apparently in his effort to
quell the percolating youth rebellion, Tim just inadvertently started the whole
question-asking beatnik movement! He’s much less appealing when Honor Blackman’s
not at his side to mitigate his unrelenting curmudgeonliness.
Of course, Justice isn’t always so grey; sometimes it’s
black and white and clear-cut. But even then it can be hard to suss out the
truth. Manfred is forced to ask some tough questions in “The Survivor,” in
which future Blofeld Donald Pleasence is either a concentration camp survivor
with a list of Nazis in hiding, or else he’s a neo-Nazi agent with a list meant
to discredit innocent people and former resistance fighters. It’s up to Manfred
to determine which in a pretty compelling tale of terrorism and genocide that
goes to pretty
Callan-y dark places for a Fifties show.
Another future Blofeld, Charles Grey, shows up twice on this
series, most memorably as an Arab sheik running the North African slave trade
from Rome in “The Slaver.” That’s a pretty brutal episode, with unrepentantly
nasty villains—and not in a Blofeld way, but in a gritty, ugly way. Right off
the bat, a slaver shoots three black kidnap victims and dumps them in the water,
pondering, “I wonder if the sharks like black meat?” As the chief slaver, Grey even
smacks around his pretty girlfriend. The slavers in question are unscrupulous
travel agents who book passage to the Holy City on pilgrimages, then instead
kidnap their passengers and sell them as cargo.
“Doesn’t anybody care?” demands an incredulous (white)
policeman
“They’re primitive people. Their families just write them
off.” explains Poccari with a dismissive wave of his hand, regrettably recalling
(to modern viewers) General Westmorland’s infamous Hearts and Minds claim that “the
Oriental” doesn’t value life the same way Westerners do. It’s a good thing the
old white Just Men care, since the black victims’ “primitive” families don’t!
At least Just Man Poccari is well-meaning, even if he’s racist, too, in his own
way. He deals these brutal villains a taste of their own medicine; this is the
episode in which he pokes a henchman in the eye with his cane through an arras.
It looks quite painful!
Poccari seems to specialize in the most clichéd plots, but I
guess it bears remembering that they weren’t
quite so clichéd back then. So
maybe the glass-half-full way to view them is that he starred in more templates
for future ITC episodes than anyone else! “The Crying Jester” is the one where
Poccari buys a terrible painting he was never meant to buy and finds himself
chased by various parties willing to kill for it. Since it can’t be its
artistic merit, obviously it’s the secrets it conceals that attract the would-be
buyers. It’s trite, sure, but it’s also one of the series’ more entertaining
episodes! “Night of the Precious Stones” is the one where a rich dowager has
her jewels stolen at a swanky function at one of Poccari’s hotels and the gang
is all rounded up, except for their mastermind. It couldn’t possibly be a
woman, could it? And certainly not a woman with whom Poccari is well
acquainted?
I'll never say…
Manfred has his share of pre-cliché classics as well, but
his still tend to be my favorite episodes, for the most part. In “The Deserter,”
Manfred finds himself defending a soldier accused of desertion despite the fact
that the man has confessed. Only Manfred is convinced of his innocence. Who is
he protecting? And why is he so confident in the face of a firing squad? The
answer is a pretty good twist, but the real reason this one’s notable is for
its guest cast. The young soldier accused of desertion is none other than
Richard Johnson, who was not only a candidate for the role of James Bond, but
later proved himself to be among the best of the Bond imitators playing a
Sixties version of Bulldog Drummond in my favorite Eurospy movie,
Deadlier Thanthe Male, and its sequel,
Some Girls Do.
TV's Sherlock Holmes, Ronald Howard,
also appears. Manfred gets the art forgery case, too, in “National Treasure,”
and it’s a pretty good one, even if he does display his skewed sense of
elitist justice.
For a modern-day muckraker who stumbled upon it, the fact
that the wife of the American Ambassador was involved in a horrible hit-and-run
and then covered it up would be a major news story. Not for Tim Collier. She’s
part of the Establishment, and therefore deserves his protection. He’ll reserve
his Justice instead for the person who dares to
blackmail her about her
culpability in “The Man in the Road.” When he’s not protecting guilty politicos
and their consorts, though, Tim gets the fun stuff like chasing a radioactive
capsule around rural France in “The Deadly Capsule” and preventing political
assassinations. In one of his better episodes, “The Prime Minister,” Honor
Blackman gets to take on a meatier role, ably assisting Tim by doing spy duties
(like staking out a posh hotel lobby and then taking initiative on her own and
following a suspect) as he sets out to stop one such assassination.
“Village of Shame” is both “the one with the whole village
full of people with a secret colluding against the one Just Man interloping in
their midst (Manfred) and “the one about a wartime collaborator who betrayed
his resistance comrades and eluded justice for decades following.” The former
is a good enough ITC plot (and possibly even original at this particular
vintage) that it makes up for the hackneyed latter, which is especially overused in this series.
The “wartime traitor” trope gets trotted out yet again in “The
Rietti Group.” This time it’s Poccari, who attends a reunion dinner of his old
partisan compatriots (including Geoffrey Keen) and of course ends up exposing
one of them as the traitor who cost them the life of a beloved comrade decades
prior. Then the group gets to sentence him to death without the involvement of
any courts or anything, because that’s the kind of bonds old resistance
fighters share. Yes, ITC, we get it. There were lots of heroes in the war and
they still can’t get over the fact that there were also some traitors, even
twenty-some years later. We get it! Unbelievably, this plotline would still rear its boring head every couple of weeks on ITC shows throughout the Sixties,
proving that England just couldn’t let go of WWII, her greatest glory, as the
Empire faded in the postwar world.
While it’s got some fun episodes (as well as some
cringe-inducing ones), The Four Just Men is overall most interesting to modern
ITC aficionados as a historical artifact.
Along with Interpol Calling, it’s a fascinating glimpse at the brief “missing
link” era that bridged the gap from Fifties detective procedurals to swinging
Sixties spy shows. The heroes are still the stuffy old men of the previous
generation, but some of their adventures encompass the globetrotting plotlines
that would fuel the Jet Age. ITC would still get a lot of mileage out of some
of these plots in future iterations on The Saint, Man in a Suitcase and other
shows. The Four Just Men may not be as exciting or even as politically correct
(and that’s saying something) as the shows it inspired, but it sets the
template, nonetheless. Casual spy fans can easily go on living their lives
without ever seeing an episode of The Four Just Men and sleep perfectly
soundly. But armchair scholars and television archaeologists who want to trace
the origins of their favorite Sixties ITC adventure shows (as well as rabid
Honor Blackman fans!) will enjoy seeing their nascent forms in this series. And
for that reason, I’m highly grateful to Network for unearthing it.
At a non-traditional press conference today in Jamaica, appropriately held at the resort that used to be Ian Fleming's house, Goldeneye, James Bond producers revealed details about the next 007 movie--the twenty-fifth official entry in the 57-year-old series. One detail they did not provide was a title. This same situation occurred on Daniel Craig's second Bond film; no title was revealed at the commencement of filming press conference for the movie that ultimately became Quantum of Solace.
Other new male faces include Billy Magnussen (a comedic standout in Game Night who previously worked with Bond 25 director Cary Fukanaga in Maniac), rumored to be playing another CIA agent, Rami Malek (Best Actor Oscar winner for last year's Bohemian Rhapsody), seemingly confirming that he'll be an antagonist by saying, via video, that he'll "be making sure Mr. Bond does not have an easy ride of it," Dali Benssalah (A Faithful Man), and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy's Toby Esterhase, David Dencik. The stunning Ana de Armas (Blade Runner 2049), who previously worked with Craig in Rian Johnson's upcoming whodunnit Knives Out, and Captain Marvel scene stealer Lashana Lynch (who is of Jamaican descent) join the hallowed ranks of Bond Girls.
