by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi movie program (http://sdvsf.org/) was four of the 17 extant
episodes of the British TV series The Prisoner, shot in the summer of 1967 and a cult item ever since. The
Prisoner was produced by Britain’s
Independent Television Service (ITS), the commercial channel that was
authorized by the Conservative government of Britain in 1955 to compete with
the BBC, and it was a follow-up to an earlier series they had done called Secret
Agent. The star of both shows, Patrick
McGoohan, had been third on the short list of candidates to star in the
original James Bond movie — first was Sean Connery, who got the part, and
second was Roger Moore, who got to play Bond in later films — and when he missed
out on the brass ring of 007 ITS hired him to play a Bond knockoff, “John
Drake,” in Secret Agent. The show
was a hit both in Britain and in the U.S., where a theme song by Johnny Rivers
was added — “Secret agent man! Secret agent man! They’ve given you a number,
and taken away your name” — which itself became a major hit. The
Prisoner may or may not have been intended
as a follow-up to Secret Agent —
McGoohan is playing the same sort of role and the show begins with him driving
up the streets of London in his Lotus 7 (a super-cool car even though it’s
decidedly down-budget from Bond’s Aston Martin!) to the headquarters of
Britain’s spy agency, where he hands in his written resignation — whereupon
it’s filed in a room with an automatic filing system. The next time we see
McGoohan he’s in a room, getting ready to rest after filing his resignation,
only a white gas starts pouring out of the air vents which immobilizes him and
renders him unconscious. When he comes to he’s in a beach resort community
called “The Village” which turns out to be a high-tech prison. In this version
he’s literally been given a
number and had his name taken away — all he’s known by is “Number Six” — and he
finds out that all access to the outside world is cut off. The Village has both
cars (taxis, since none of the residents are allowed to drive for themselves)
and phones, but they only connect
within the compound, not outside. The Village has a store that sells maps,
among other things, but they only show the Village itself, not the outside
world, so Number 6 literally has no idea where on Earth he is.
He’s told by
Number Two, the authority figure who runs the place (and is himself supervised
by a mysterious “Number One,” whom we never see — I suspect that, like Samuel
Beckett’s Godot and “The Man” in Don Siegel’s film The Lineup, Number One is a religious skeptic’s metaphor for
God), that he’s there because there is valuable information locked in his head
and the people who run the Village want it. It’s deliberately kept ambiguous
just which side in the Cold War
the people who run the Village are on: whether they’re Brits or Americans
anxious to pump Number Six’s secrets out of him to make sure they never get to
the enemy, or they are the enemy
seeking the secret information to use against “our” side. Also one of the nicer
touches is the deliberately archaic appearance of the Village’s residents and
its buildings: the whole place looks like a British beach resort c. 1910 and
there are such anachronisms as a marching band playing turn-of-the-last-century
band favorites (including a piece in episode one that sounds like one of
Mozart’s adaptations of Ländler,
the traditional Austrian dance that became the basis for the waltz) and
elaborate costumes for the residents that evoke the fashions of the 1910’s.
(Number Six is even forced to give up the modern jacket he wore on the outside
and put on a retro one instead.) Interestingly, the emblem of the Village is a
high-wheel bicycle: there’s a full-sized model of one in Number Two’s office
and each resident is supposed to wear a badge with the high-wheel logo and
their number (though Number Six, of course, refuses). Patrick McGoohan was
credited as an “executive producer” on the series but according to sources at
the time (and since) he was disappointed that as the series progressed he was
given fewer of the challenging scripts he had expected when he signed on to the
project and the producers and writers steered it into more conventional
action-adventure — but oddly enough, of the four episodes shown last night, I
quite liked the last one, “Hammer Into Anvil,” the best. The showing last night
began with the premiere episode, “Arrival,” which gives the exposition of how
Number 6 got into the Village in the first place — reportedly the rough cut was
two hours long and it had to be scissored down to 50 minutes for airing (though
I suspect the original cut was quite good on its own and could have made an
excellent and effective stand-alone movie) — and of course the premise of each
episode was how Number Six tried to escape and how the seemingly all-powerful
masters of the Village foiled him.
The second episode, “The Chimes of Big Ben,”
depicts Number Six entering a Village art contest and thereby getting the tools
he needs to build a boat — though he disguises it as three abstract sculptures
— and escape in the company of Number Eight, a.k.a. Nadia Rokovsky (Nadia
Grey), though in the end — after an ordeal reminiscent of the Velvet
Underground song “The Gift,” after being shipped in a packing crate to London
via Denmark, it turns out they’re back in the Village and Number Eight was a
Village plant, set to entrap Number Six in an escape attempt in hopes that its
failure would freak him out and get him to cough up the mysterious
“information” the denizens of the Village want from him. In the third episode,
“The Schizoid Man,” the people running the Village decide to freak out Number
Six by sending in a seemingly identical double, “Number 12,” in order to
destroy his sense of identity so they can break him down and get the
information. The only visible differences are that Number 12 has a moustache,
is left-handed whereas the real Number Six was right-handed, and wears a white
jacket with a black embroidered collar instead of Number Six’s black jacket
with a white embroidered collar. The special effects in these scenes are quite
well done for a TV budget, and the sight of Patrick McGoohan fighting Patrick
McGoohan is surprisingly convincing even though, like Curtis Bernhardt having
Bette Davis fight Bette Davis in A Stolen Life, the scene was done with frequent cutaways between
the real McGoohan and his stunt person, Frank Maher, doubling him in the scenes
in which one of the men had his back to the camera. Even the episode’s ending
is a knockoff of A Stolen Life:
the good McGoohan kills the bad McGoohan and tries to impersonate him to be
flown off the island, but we know
he’s going to give himself away somehow and the only question is how — he
mentions having recently seen a woman who in fact has been dead for a year —
and he boards a helicopter, presumably flying him back to London, but is told
to wear a blindfold, and of course when the helicopter lands and the blindfold
is removed he’s back in the Village.
The fourth episode, “Hammer Into Anvil,”
was by far the best of the ones shown last night; in it, Number Six decides to
torment a new Number Two by acting deliberately crazy, going to the Village
store and carefully comparing six records of Bizet’s L’Arlesienne (which, as one imdb.com “trivia” poster noted, is an
appropriate piece of music because it was the score for a play in which an
unscrupulous woman, whom we’re never shown on stage, drives a man crazy) to
note nonexistent differences between them; inserting an ad in the Village
newspaper, the Tally Ho, with a
(garbled) quote from Don Quixote;
and flying a captured pigeon back to the Village’s central office with a note
containing a set of numbers representing a coded message — only the message
turns out to be the familiar nursery rhyme, “Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker man,
bake me a cake as fast as you can.” (I suspect the writer, Roger Woddis, was
deliberately alluding to the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies, in which Hope and Crosby recited this rhyme
just as they were about to punch out the villains.) In the end Number Two
reports himself as having breached the security of the Village — he’s convinced
that Number Six is really D-6, security officer for X-O 4, presumably the
agency that runs the Village — and though he’s still a prisoner, Number Six can
count at least one minor victory. The episode title comes from a quote by
German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “You must either conquer and rule or
serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer” (“Du mußt
steigen oder sinken/Du mußt herrschen und gewinnen,/Oder dienen und
verlieren,/Leiden oder triumphieren,/Amboß oder Hammer sein”), though as an
imdb.com “trivia” poster noted, in his essay “Politics and the English
Language,” George Orwell noted, “In real life it is always the anvil that
breaks the hammer, never the other way about” — as indeed happens in this
story. “Hammer Into Anvil” is also by far the most creatively scored episode of
these four; instead of just using stock cues from the ITS music library (along
with a main theme by Ron Grainer, who also composed the main theme for Doctor
Who), this time musical director Andrew
Elms artfully created an original score based on themes from L’Arlesienne.
The Prisoner suffers from two mistakes — they changed the actor playing Number Two
in virtually every episode (it would have been much better, I think, if they’d
made Number Two a series regular played by the same actor each time and
carefully built up an ongoing antagonism between him and Number Six), and they
made “The Rover,” the contraption by which the Village administration enforces
its discipline, a giant balloon which depending on its programming can either
drag a recalcitrant inmate back to the Village or simply kill him or her by
smothering them. Though much of the retro appearance of the Village is
appealingly campy — early on I joked that we were watching Dante’s Inferno as staged by Monty Python — the Rover balloon just
looks stupid. The Prisoner has
some interesting antecedents — the clashes between Number Six and Number Two
can’t help but recall the confrontation scenes between Winston Smith and O’Brien
in the third part of 1984, and
Orwell’s legendary dystopia is also evoked by the continuous 24/7 electronic
surveillance to which the Village’s inhabitants are subjected. Indeed, one
contraption in Number Two’s headquarters actually looks like a camera boom and functions the same way. It
also has some interesting descendants: when I watched “Arrival” I was reminded
of The Maze Runner — which also
begins with a central character suddenly and unwillingly plucked out of the
existence he’s known and thrown into a secret world whose unfamiliar rules
totally disorient him — and couldn’t help but wonder if James Dashner, author
of the books on which the Maze Runner films were based, actually copied this gimmick from The
Prisoner. Overall, I quite liked The
Prisoner — at least these four episodes —
though there was also a sense that too little was being done with the concept
and this could have been an even better show than it was.
