Patrick McGoohan and ‘The Prisoner,’ Out in a 40th-Anniversary DVD Edition (original) (raw)

DVD

A Spy Trapped in a Nightmare of Psychedelia

Oct. 19, 2008

AS we’ve been reminded lately with a stream of 40th-anniversary remembrances, 1968 was an unusually tumultuous year, with the Columbia University riots, the student uprising in Paris and the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, not to mention the fiasco of the Democratic National Convention. American television had its own upheaval that year. On June 1 audiences accustomed to the corny vaudeville of “The Jackie Gleason Show” on CBS stumbled upon an utterly baffling summer replacement: “The Prisoner,” recently released on DVD in a 10-disc anniversary set.

The premise seemed simple enough. An unnamed man (Patrick McGoohan) resigns from some sort of top-secret intelligence job, whereupon he is kidnapped to a sprawling, secretive complex known only as the Village. There he is surrounded by other captured spy types, and his ever-present captors try to trick, drug and otherwise manipulate him into revealing why he quit. The man, rechristened No. 6 by his captors, spends 17 episodes resisting their efforts and plotting his getaway.

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Patrick McGoohan in “Checkmate,” an episode of “The Prisoner,” a series that made its American debut in 1968 and is out on DVD in an anniversary edition.Credit...A&E Home Video

This conventional cat-and-mouse game, of course, was merely the starting point from which “The Prisoner” plumbed issues of freedom, conformity, privacy and control. The Village (in real life, the Hotel Portmeirion resort in North Wales) was a microcosm of civilization, and within its confines which, if the captives decided to cooperate, could be comfortable enough the eternal drama of an individual’s relationship to society was played out.

In the episode “The Schizoid Man,” for instance, the Village wardens use a duplicate No. 6 to try to convince the real McCoy that he’s someone else, thus raising ticklish questions about identity and one’s mutable sense of self. When No. 6 campaigns to run the Village in “Free for All,” he gets a bracing lesson in democracy and the limits of power.

Among other things “The Prisoner” was the flip side of the ’60s spy craze. During that swinging decade James Bond, Napoleon Solo and their ilk were out to save the world by snooping. Here the operatives themselves were under the microscope, in effect answering for the sins of that most hated of Vietnam-era institutions that they enabled, the military-industrial complex.

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Patrick McGoohan in "The Prisoner."Credit...A&E Home Video

Although “The Prisoner,” an import from Britain originally seen there in 1967, has now achieved cult status, it baffled most viewers in its day. It didn’t help that British television and then CBS broadcast it without regard to logical sequencing, a pattern that persisted when the series went into repeats. Viewed in their ideal order, the 17 episodes depict No. 6’s inevitable transformation from a hounded inmate, constantly outwitted by his masters, into a table-turner who winds up thwarting their schemes.

But the real reason “The Prisoner” was such a jumble had nothing to do with chronology. Often as not the show was so wrapped up in its own anti-establishment themes that it just didn’t make sense. In this regard, the set’s program guide is refreshingly informative and frank, peppered with comments like “the low point of the series” and “The Village just got a whole lot weirder.”

“The Prisoner” was usually most incomprehensible when Mr. McGoohan himself, the co-creator and executive producer, also wrote and directed, as he did with the finale, “Fall Out.” Among its myriad bizarre elements are hooded spectators in black-and-white rubber masks clapping to the spiritual “Dem Bones,” a bewigged judge spouting lines like “Give it to me, baby!” and machine-gun fire punctuating the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” (Ironic, eh?) At the episode’s end it’s not even clear that No. 6 has made a clean getaway.

Seen at a 40-year distance “The Prisoner” seems intelligent enough to be forgiven most of its excesses, especially if you treat the whole thing as an allegorical time capsule. This was the ’60s, after all, when ramparts of all sorts were coming down. Certainly “The Prisoner” still looks like a product of its time, replete with garish colors, Lava lamps, Eero Aarnio’s Ball chair and other psychedelic touches. Yet the series also left behind some durable images, like the huge white weather balloons known as Rovers that attacked inmates foolish enough to try to take it on the lam. And No. 6’s trademark line “I am not a number, I am a free man” may be the most quotable declaration of human individuality ever uttered on the small screen.

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