On my crowded desk right now are seven books just on  The Prisoner, ranging from episode guides to serious considerations of its philosophical and political implications. All are fascinating, just as the show was fascinating when it was first broadcast on Britain’s ITV on October first,  1967 (it hit America on CBS in June 1968).

 

Also on my desk is  The Prisoner: Complete Series Megaset (40th Anniversary Edition), the latest publication of the whole 17-episode series, from A&E Channel video library.   The Prisoner was originally issued in five individual box sets in April of 2001, and simultaneously in one big box for $150. The new  Prisoner megaset hit the street on July 25th (retailing for $139.95), cheaper, apparently, because of the thinpak cases, even though the set features new pull out material.  The new set has sharp transfers and the addition of a booklet on the series and a fold out map of the village, and, as far as I can tell, the addition of DD Stereo tracks on the discs (though some on line reviews indicate that the discs are the same as the previous set’s).

 The Prisoner made its debut to hosannahs from the print media, grateful for brain candy finally manufactured in that vast wasteland. But  The Prisoner may have been too brainy. It has the encoded thematic complexity of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and what the reviewers at the time couldn’t know, a production crew in disharmony. Co-creator and story editor George Markstein left halfway though and one key collaborator, director Don Chaffey, also escaped. McGoohan himself eventually “left” the show, closing it down and ending it abruptly rather than continue with a second season. The consequence is that ultimately  The Prisoner is inconsistent. Like certain plays of Shakespeare or the Sherlock Holmes canon, it contradicts itself. Thus there can be no set answer to what  The Prisoner is about, based solely on critical interpretation of the show. This does not negate the fact that  The Prisoner is a great television show,

Forever after, Markstein and McGoohan would bicker in print over who invented the show. Was Markstein, who was a Jewish refugee (not American, as the Wikipedia has it) from Hitler’s Europe, really a spy himself, one with inside knowlege of a secret camp in Scotland used to rehabilitate spies? Or did the show’s idea come from the causal comment McGoohan heard at a cocktail party from a member of the governmental elite, when the actor posed the casual question, Where  do spies go when they retire?

The best way to approach  The Prisoner is through its credit sequence. It’s one of the most unusual openings in television history. For one thing, it is just over three minutes long, and each week walked the viewer though the premise all over again: how a spy resigned in some kind of fit of moral outrage and then woke up to find himself trapped on a bucolic holiday isle seemingly under the supervision of his former masters. In a way, and perhaps like all credit sequences, it promises more than the show can deliver. It is like a music video, all highlights and tease.

 

The credit sequence for  The Prisoner begins with a crack of thunder and the sight of ominous dark clouds. There has been a momentous rift in the social fabric, public and secret.

Then there is the simultaneous sounds of bongos on the soundtrack from the score by Ron Grainer, and the sight of a long road whose vanishing point issues forth a yellow Lotus 7. Close up, we see the intense, angry driver, Patrick McGoohan. The usual immediate association for him is with John Drake, his character in  Danger Man or Secret Agent, the cultish, sober spy program that aired off and on from from 1960 to 1968. Controversy reigns over whether this driver is Drake (McGoohan has “denied” it).

In successive shots, the man progresses from lonely road to London, past a church (Westminster Cathedral? That would tie in with McGoohan’s Catholicism, and the religious symbols he is said to have planted in the show; in any case, it is a really famous landmark and I am a dummy for not instantly recognizing it), and then turns right and descends into a parking garage. Next the man is shown walking angrily down a hallway with checkerboard lighting, passing in and out of shadow, his footfalls thumping ominously, not unlike Lee Marvin in the airport at the beginning of  Point Blank, also made in 1967.

 

The man, this future prisoner, known as P in the script and No. 6 in the Village, is then shown pacing back and forth in front of an inpassive bureaucrat. This is not the way James Bond treated M. The man behind the desk in the credits is played by George Markstein, his only screen appearance. Pounding the table, P is obviously angry about somthing. But what? And if he is angry, and telling the bureaucrat why he is angry, and offering up a resignation letter, why are the Villagers so curious about why he resigned during the subsequent 17 hours?

 

P has left. While he travels through the city his photo (a publicity shot of John Drake) is processed by automation as resigned. P arrives home and moves furiously around his digs. He trows a batch of travel brochures into his his suitcase. In a sense, he will get the vacation he seeks, transported shortly to a faraway locale.

While P is in his flat packing for a holiday, a tall funereal Edwardian figure pulls up  in a hearse behind P’s Lotus and approaches the door. In broad daylight he attaches a large tube to the keyhole, releasing thick white powder or gas into the flat. Note how often doors and doorways figure in the credit sequence as they do in the subsequent show itself. Portals to authority. Thresholds to secrets that don’t exist.

 

Sensing the gas P stops abruptly. For the first time we see the patented McGoohan freeze, a sudden tensing created in mid flight. He falls back onto a chesterfield and falls asleep.

Part of McGoohan’s appeal as an actor, at least a lead TV actor is his sardonic independence, his misleading seriousness broken up by real physical wit, and his his suave twitchiness, found in those bizarre stops and starts. He has a face made for the small screen, handsome yet odd, with protuberant eyes, and a voice with several different tones or accents in it at once. An international man. As partially a vanity project, McGoohan must carry the show, and he does.

But the credit sequence (in which there is a dearth of actual credits)  still isn’t over. P awakens in what appears to be the same room, but utside his window is a new locale. Here the music changes to a haunting theme with guitar and harmonium (?).

Now for the first time, words, in voice over, we hear words that summarize the hierarchies of life in the Village. It’s a dialogue between the Prisoner and that episode’s No. 2.

The Prisoner asks, “Where am I?”

The answers: “In the Village.”

“What do you want?”

“Information.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“That would be telling. We want information. Information. Information!”

“You won’t get it.”

“By hook or by crook, we will.”

“Who are you?”

“The new Number 2.”

“Who is Number 1?”

“**You are Number 6.”

“I am not a number — I am a free man!” To which No. 2 laughs sadistically.

 

The dialogue is a mix of libertarianism and Lewis Carroll, with a hint of Holocaust anxiety (quarantined men stamped with numbers). Under it we see the current No. 2, the monitoring devices, the beach, and the Rover, the large weather balloon dragooned into being the Village cop. The power of the sequence is in the quick editing and the great music. The first half harks back to silent cinema (so does the second half, though: it doesn’t really need the dialogue, though it is helpful). The sequence manipulates the viewer just as the Village seeks to manipulate the Prisoner, psychologically, except the goal is to inform, not mislead or trick, as in the barrage of psychological experiments the Village tries on No. 6.

 

 

To me, the most interesting part of the credit sequence is No. 6 rashly tossing in some travel brochures. He doesn’t know where he is going, he just has to get out of there, some where far away, and preferably sunny. He gets his wish. The Village is an even-climed resort where, as we learn, all your needs are met (if you comply). It’s half prison, half retirement home. Is the Prisoner the center of its attention? Does it exist  solely to pry out of him his secrets? It’s raison d’etre changes in the course of the show, but that is one possible theory. Still,  The Prisoner remains one of the greatest TV shows of all time, and continually rewards repeat viewings. It’s one of the tightest focused shows, anticipating the conceptual type of show such as  24 and  Lost only now coming to American television.

 

The full frame transfers are crisp and clean, and the English (with subtitles) Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo is fine, with all 10 discs in thinpaks. New to the set is a 60-page “Limited Edition” pamphlet with episode summaries and trivia, and a map of the Village.

All the extras are carried over from the old set: interviews with production manager Bernie Williams, rare footage of the 1966 location shooting, with commentary by production designer Bernie Williams, “The Prisoner Video Companion,”an alternate edit of the episode “The Chimes of Big Ben,” “Foreign File Cabinet” footage, original broadcast trailers, original series promotional trailer, gallery of promotional materials and production stills, “interactive” map of the Village, and trivia quizs.

A&E’s discs can be controversial. There are running time discrepancies, transfer issues, and pricing outrages. This strikes me, a neophyte, as a good set, though I’m searching the net for a close, detailed analysis of the transfers.

 

Comments: None

Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Δ