ROGER ROSENBLATT:

The reason one ought to give thanks to AMC for showing these movies back-to-back is that they serve to continually remind viewers how little justice they get to see in other places.

Televised murder trials are followed by explosions of rage and despair when it is perceived, as it often is, that justice has not been done. When a celebrity adds to his fame by confessing some transgression on a talk show, where is the justice in that?

No justice for Cambodia's Pol Pot, no justice for Saddam Hussein, no justice yet for the Bosnian murderers. Would it not be gratifying to be able to summon all the criminals to one room and call in Charlie Chan? Unfortunately, one cannot do that in the world as it is, and so the idea of justice has become a quaint dream.

Big justice and small, how are the frauds to be brought to justice, or the liars and cheats, or the gossips, or the back-biters, or the talentless and overpraised? Where is justice for the people who claim credit for other people's work, or in the ingrates, or the fakes?

Where's the justice at a book party where people are invited to lie through their teeth, or at a dinner party, where an absent friend is torn to tatters? We need a new series of Charlie Chan movies: Charlie Chan at the dinner party; Charlie Chan at the power breakfast, at the fund-raiser, at the HMO, the newspaper. Who would dare? How about Charlie Chan in Congress, or Charlie Chan in the Oval Office? Is there a producer in the house?

In "Crimes and Misdemeanors" Woody Allen created a sort of anti-Charlie Chan film. It is a wonderful piece of work but a sad one because, in the end, though all the principals are gathered in one place, the ambitious and the shallow and even the killers go free, while the good and authentic people are punished.