Honest tugboat captain Jake Hughes (John Laughlin) is framed for heroin smuggling and swiftly convicted. His beautiful, sophisticated young wife Lisa (Maria Holvoe) meets with the mysterious yet thoroughly corrupt judge (John Cullum) on her husband's case begging for clemency. Judge Sleazewad agrees to be lenient if she'll have sex with him.
The prospect of a roll in the hay with an aging creep is less than appetizing for her. She also is not quite dumb enough to just take his word for it that he will do what he promises vis-a-vis her husband's sentencing hearing.
With little more than a week until her husband is sentenced she phones up do-gooder Robert McCall (Edward Woodward) after seeing his ad in the newspaper and he agrees to intercede if he can. But it turns out to be part of a much bigger plot involving many more people with considerably greater influence than one corrupt judge.
The comparison the audience is implicitly asked to make is between McCall and the judge, both powerful men who are pushing 60. Both have a distinguished air and a taste for the finer things. But with the judge they are all affectations and status symbols. McCall is just being himself.
The light of McCall's character glows brighter against the shade of the antagonist. McCall, operating outside the justice system, would never trade on his abilities in order to get sex. The judge, an authority within the justice system, has a different kind of power than McCall does and abuses it more for the joy of abusing it than anything else. We see but another reason why the hero has forsaken the system in his encounter with this very flawed creep who has risen to a high level within it.
Maria Holvoe was not a great actress as evidenced by her performance here. But the writing is also a tad shaky at the beginning with a lot of unnecessary dialogue. Those are the only two real drawbacks of this entry.
The prospect of a roll in the hay with an aging creep is less than appetizing for her. She also is not quite dumb enough to just take his word for it that he will do what he promises vis-a-vis her husband's sentencing hearing.
With little more than a week until her husband is sentenced she phones up do-gooder Robert McCall (Edward Woodward) after seeing his ad in the newspaper and he agrees to intercede if he can. But it turns out to be part of a much bigger plot involving many more people with considerably greater influence than one corrupt judge.
The comparison the audience is implicitly asked to make is between McCall and the judge, both powerful men who are pushing 60. Both have a distinguished air and a taste for the finer things. But with the judge they are all affectations and status symbols. McCall is just being himself.
The light of McCall's character glows brighter against the shade of the antagonist. McCall, operating outside the justice system, would never trade on his abilities in order to get sex. The judge, an authority within the justice system, has a different kind of power than McCall does and abuses it more for the joy of abusing it than anything else. We see but another reason why the hero has forsaken the system in his encounter with this very flawed creep who has risen to a high level within it.
Maria Holvoe was not a great actress as evidenced by her performance here. But the writing is also a tad shaky at the beginning with a lot of unnecessary dialogue. Those are the only two real drawbacks of this entry.
