Subscribe

New reviews, interviews, and features via RSS or Email.

Related Reviews

Leo McKern

• Space 1999: The Complete First Season (1975)

Peter Bowles (II)

• Space 1999: The Complete First Season (1975)

This Film On

The Prisoner: The Complete Series

(1967)

840 min. ITC Entertainment. Director: Patrick McGoohan. Cast: Patrick McGoohan, Leo McKern, Peter Bowles (II).

Are we self-determining individuals or "cabbages" content in our ordered rows of conformity? Are we free or merely prisoners of a police state we continue to elect into power? Can we put our trust in our essential institutions: schools, hospitals, science, psychology, government? Can we put our trust in ourselves? These are heady questions to consume with a TV dinner, but they are the bread and butter of The Prisoner, the brilliant and enigmatic 1967-1968 televisionary masterpiece conceived by George Markstein and developed by actor Patrick McGoohan.

Markstein came up with the original concept, inspired by an actual WWII prison camp: when a secret agent (McGoohan) resigns, he is taken against his will to a pretty but sinsister retirement resort for people who know too much, a place called "The Village." Each week, the agent—now dubbed "Number Six"—must fight against his captors to retain his individuality and sanity. Through the agency of the middle manager "Number Two" (a position with a high rate of turnover),  Number Six's keepers want to know, "Why did you resign?" Number Six wants to know, "Who is Number One?" This battle of wills roils through seventeen episodes until an ambiguous, nightmare-styled conclusion that identifies Number One. A strong central conflict also defined the making of the series, with McGoohan and Markstein ever at loggerheads. The buck most definitely stopped with executive producer McGoohan, who lined up the show's backing, directed five of the seventeen episodes (twice under the pseudonym "Joseph Serf"), and wrote three of them (one under the pseudonym "Paddy Fitz").

McGoohan was a well-paid British TV star when he resigned as lead of the hugely popular Danger Man (resold in America as Secret Agent) and convinced Lew Grade, the powerful head of ITC Entertainment, that the new concept of The Prisoner was worth his while. Grade could not have anticipated how strange The Prisoner would turn out to be, and how turbulent the production. Audiences were similarly taken by surprise: the mainstream spy-craze pleasures of the James Bond-esque Danger Man turned into a surreal, Orwellian allegory of modern civilization. Though The Prisoner was coy at best on the subject of whether or not "Number Six" was Danger Man's John Drake (and McGoohan publicly denied it), audiences couldn't be blamed for interpreting The Prisoner as a bizarre continuation of their favorite show.

Much of The Prisoner's character comes from the location setting of Portmeirion, a hotel resort in North Wales that stood in for "The Village" (in small portions, the resort was also ingeniously recreated for studio shoots). Portmeirion's quaint, just-so surfaces were a perfect caricature of superficial civilization, hiding an underbelly of fear and power-madness. The Villagers are cowed into smiling docility by a deadly guard known as Rover (an omnipresent bubble convincingly played by a weather balloon), but the "unmutual" Number Six refuses to be broken, even as he is subjected to beatings, psychological warfare, and invasive experimental treatments, including psychedelic drug trips. At times, Number Six plays along as a strategy (running for the office of Number Two in "Free for All") or goes on the offensive (breaking Number Two in "Hammer Into Anvil"). Other than Number Six and "the new Number Two" of the week, the only regular character is Number Two's Butler (the diminutive, poker-faced Angelo Muscat). Peter Swanwick is a semi-regular presence as The Supervisor in charge of monitoring the Villagers.

With its themes of constant surveillance, cold war, and severely curtailed civil liberties, The Prisoner was not only of its time (in line with the countercultural movements of the '60s) but ahead of it. The episode "Checkmate" makes overt the series' subtext: that, as a man who has chosen to reject authority, Number Six is a pawn, whose brains and brawn can at best cause a weekly stalemate. If nothing else, this was a subversive idea for a television series: a hero who often lost and whose victories were phyrric. Nevertheless, his adamant struggle to retain his individuality and never conform is clearly heroic, and he crushes the spirit of a series of Number Twos, each convinced he or she will be the one finally to break Number Six. The most memorable of the Number Twos is Leo McKern (Help!), who faces off with McGoohan in "The Chimes of Big Ben," "Once Upon a Time" and the series finale "Fall Out." "Once Upon a Time," in particular, demonstrates that McKern was the best actor to go toe-to-toe with McGoohan: the show's psychodramatic duel to the death gave McKern a nervous breakdown, but the episode is as astonishing a piece of performance as it is an avant-garde theatrical triumph.

Nearly every episode in The Prisoner's short run is a bona fide classic (the conspicuous failure "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling," a logy episode designed to accomodate McGoohan's absence as she shot Ice Station Zebra, is the exception that proves the rule), though McGoohan claimed he only ever intended to make a core seven episodes and the rest are effectively padding. But "padding" like "Living in Harmony" (a head-trip Western variation on the series' concept) and "The Girl Who Was Death" (a campy Danger Man callback framed as a Village bedtime story) remains provocative at best and entertaining at least. The bare essentials are "Arrival," the devastating political satire "Free for All," "Checkmate" (which asked who are the prisoners and who are the warders?), "Once Upon a Time" and "Fall Out."

The series was always enormously creative (get aload of McGoohan's invention of "Kosho," a martial arts competition on trampolines across a dunk tank), but the wild finale took the cake. It dealt with Number Six's introduction to Number One, preceded by bizarre ceremonies in a subterranean chamber. After playing "The Kid" in "Living in Harmony," Alexis Kanner returned to be the personification of ('60s) youth revolt that must be suppressed by the powers that be. Many have dismissed "Fall Out" as desperate, incomprehensible gibberish that failed to provide closure; indeed, on its initial airing, the finale sent the series' viewers into an angry frenzy (McGoohan was even reportedly accosted on the street). In fact, "Fall Out" has it all, including answers: it simply heightens the allegory beyond the comfort level of most viewers. It asks uncomfortable questions about what would constitute "winning" in the universe of the show: Number Six spends most of the episode sitting smugly on a throne—is this the man we came to respect? When all hell breaks loose at the show's end, another of the series' patented seeming victories turns out to be patently quite the opposite. There is no escape from The Village: you're living in it.

Sponsored Links