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).
The basic plot has been recycled by the likes of 'The Star Chamber' (1983); although Wallace's vigilantes allow their quarries to live if they agree to mend their ways. Considering the increasing social inequalities still being lovingly nurtured by today's political establishment (as recently depicted in Ken Loach's 'I Daniel Blake'), we probably need four more Just Men more than ever nearly a hundred years later; although it's hard to imagine the British press responding so nonchalantly to death threats to one of today's captains of industry.
It's extraordinary that this film could make heroes of what are presumably anarchists attempting to right capitalist wrongs at the very time when Russia had just fallen to the Bolsheviks and Bulldog Drummond was gathering together his own gang of vigilantes to fight off swarthy foreigners inciting British workers to rise up against their exploiters.
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).
The basic plot has been recycled by the likes of 'The Star Chamber' (1983); although Wallace's vigilantes allow their quarries to live if they agree to mend their ways. Considering the increasing social inequalities still being lovingly nurtured by today's political establishment (as recently depicted in Ken Loach's 'I Daniel Blake'), we probably need four more Just Men more than ever nearly a hundred years later; although it's hard to imagine the British press responding so nonchalantly to death threats to one of today's captains of industry.
It's extraordinary that this film could make heroes of what are presumably anarchists attempting to right capitalist wrongs at the very time when Russia had just fallen to the Bolsheviks and Bulldog Drummond was gathering together his own gang of vigilantes to fight off swarthy foreigners inciting British workers to rise up against their exploiters.
