There Ain't No Justice | |
---|---|
Directed by | Pen Tennyson |
Written by | Novel & screenplay: James Curtis Sergei Nolbandov Pen Tennyson |
Produced by | Michael Balcon |
Starring | Jimmy Hanley Edward Chapman Edward Rigby Michael Wilding |
Cinematography | Mutz Greenbaum |
Edited by | Ray Pitt |
Music by | Ernest Irving |
Production company | |
Distributed by | ABFD |
Release date |
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Running time | 83 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Budget | £19,883 [1] |
There Ain't No Justice is a 1939 British sports drama film directed by Pen Tennyson and starring Jimmy Hanley, Edward Chapman and Edward Rigby. The film is based on the 1937 novel of the same name by James Curtis.
Tommy Mutch (Jimmy Hanley) is a garage mechanic and small-time boxer. With his family in financial difficulty he needs to find money in a hurry. As luck would have it he meets boxing manager Sammy Sanders (Edward Chapman). Sammy assures Tommy he can get him lucrative main event bouts.
Tommy is promoted as the next boxing star which is reinforced with a series of convincing wins. However, Tommy discovers that the bouts were fixed by a gambling syndicate. He realises now that he has been set up by his manager and is expected to take a fall.
He has little choice but to go-ahead but needs to come up with a plan. One that will guarantee a financial return for his family while also hitting the syndicates in the pocket.
James Curtis adapted his own novel, There Ain't No Justice to provide the screenplay for the film. He had done so the year before for one of his own novels, They Drive By Night, for the film of the same name. As with that adaptation he found himself having to remove areas of dialogue and story that would not get by the censors of the time. Many of these would be depictions of graphic violence against men rather than the sexual nature of his previous novel. [2]
This was the first film directed by Pen Tennyson, who had served as Assistant Director to Alfred Hitchcock from 1934. He would go on to direct two further films before being killed during World War II. [3]
The film features an uncredited role by real life boxer Bombardier Billy Wells, [4] best remembered as one of the gongmen featured in the Rank Organisation films logo. [5]
It was released theatrically in the UK with the slogan "Real people, Real problems, a human document". Due in part to its distinctive realistic portrayal of the boxing world it became a critical success. [6] However, the author Graham Greene, having praised the previous year's James Curtis adaptation ( They Drive by Night ), was not convinced. He considered the film to be timid and too refined in its depiction of the subject matter. [7]
It is available on DVD in the UK on Volume Eight of Network's Ealing Studios Rarities Collection. It is often shown at film revivals in both the US and UK and was shown in May 2010 as part of BFI Southbank's "Capital Tales" season. [8] It was also shown on the London Live television channel on Sunday 13th Sept 2015.
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Jimmy Hanley was an English actor who appeared in the popular Huggetts film series, and in ITV's most popular advertising magazine programme, Jim's Inn, from 1957 to 1963.
The Proud Valley is a 1940 Ealing Studios film starring Paul Robeson. Filmed in the South Wales coalfield, the principal Welsh coal mining area, the film is about a seaman who joins a mining community. It includes their passion for singing as well as the dangers and precariousness of working in a mine.
Jenny Hanley is an English actress and presenter. She was one of the presenters of the ITV children's magazine programme Magpie. She currently presents a show on Boom Radio.
Edward Chapman was an English actor who starred in many films and television programmes, but is chiefly remembered as "Mr. William Grimsdale", the officious superior and comic foil to Norman Wisdom's character of Pitkin in many of his films from the late 1950s and 1960s.
Frederick Penrose "Pen" Tennyson was a British film director whose promising career was cut short when he died in a plane crash. Tennyson gained experience as an assistant director to Alfred Hitchcock in several of his British films during the 1930s. Tennyson directed three films between 1939 and his death in 1941.
It Always Rains on Sunday is a 1947 British film adaptation of Arthur La Bern's novel of the same name, directed by Robert Hamer. The film has been compared with the poetic realism movement in the French cinema of a few years earlier by the British writers Robert Murphy and Graham Fuller.
James Curtis was a British writer who was best known for his novels, They Drive By Night and There Ain't No Justice, both of which were made into feature films.
Edward Coke MC, known professionally as Edward Rigby, was a British character actor.
Thomas William Murphy was a New Zealand boxer. An early World Featherweight Champion, he was the first world champion of any weightclass to come from New Zealand. In his early career, he took the New Zealand Lightweight Championship.
They Drive by Night is a 1938 British black-and-white crime thriller film directed by Arthur B. Woods and starring Emlyn Williams as Shorty, an ex-con, and Ernest Thesiger as Walter Hoover, an ex-schoolmaster. It was produced by Warner Bros. - First National Productions and based on the 1938 novel They Drive by Night by James Curtis.
Tony Morgano was an American professional boxer, iron worker, politician and boxing trainer'
Cheer Boys Cheer is a 1939 British comedy film directed by Walter Forde and starring Nova Pilbeam, Edmund Gwenn, Jimmy O'Dea, Graham Moffatt, Moore Marriott and Peter Coke.
Convoy is a 1940 British war film, produced by Ealing Studios, directed by Pen Tennyson and starring Clive Brook, John Clements and Edward Chapman. Convoy was Tennyson's last film before he was killed in an aircraft crash, while serving in the Royal Navy.
The Crowd Roars is a 1938 American sports drama film directed by Richard Thorpe and starring Robert Taylor as a boxer who gets entangled in the seamier side of the sport. It was remade in 1947 as Killer McCoy, featuring Mickey Rooney in the title role. This film was not a remake of the 1932 film of the same name starring James Cagney. The supporting cast for the 1938 version features Edward Arnold, Frank Morgan, Lionel Stander, and Jane Wyman.
Salute John Citizen is a 1942 black and white British drama film directed by Maurice Elvey and starring Edward Rigby, Mabel Constanduros and Jimmy Hanley. The Bunting family face up to the fortunes of war during the Second World War.
It's Hard to Be Good is a 1948 British comedy film directed by Jeffrey Dell and starring Jimmy Hanley, Anne Crawford and Raymond Huntley. In the film, an ex-army officer finds his altruistic attempts to improve the world are unsuccessful.
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The Ring is a 1952 American film noir film directed by Kurt Neumann and based on a novel by Irving Shulman. It tells the story of a Mexican-American male who becomes a boxer, believing this kind of achievement will gain him respect among the English-speaking white majority. The film was shot in various locations in early 1950s Los Angeles. The film examines institutionalized bigotry.
There Ain't No Justice is sports novel by the British writer James Curtis first published in 1937 by Jonathan Cape. The novel was republished in 2014 by London Books as the tenth title in its London Classics series with a contemporary introduction by Martin Knight.