The Prisoner means a lot to me, too -- in 1971 or so it was the first cultural experience I shared with my father. I still love the show.
McGoohan was an intensely serious actor (and sometime writer/director) who understandably found the "John Drake" role confining (and refused the role of James Bond). The Prisoner gave him a way to break out within the confines of weekly telly, and to me it seems less akin to a spy spoof or a 1970s big-studio paranoia movie than to the theater of the time. The next-to-last episode, a parody of contemporary psychotherapies, is easy to picture as a one-act on Drury Lane.
Intriguing piece. I would not have connected Lost with The Prisoner since their opening imagery seems so different. Where the Prisoner looks out his window at an exaggerated English holiday village, Jack sees the blank slate of Crusoe’s island. But as a study of a “closed community,” as you term it, and one with a mystery at its heart, it makes perfect sense.
One thing that interests me about The Prisoner is the mini-era when it was made and how it perhaps represents, along with Casino Royale the same year (1967), the end of the spy thriller in its original form. Has a genre ever gone from heyday to parody as quickly as the spy story went from Dr. No (1962), The Man from U.N.C.L.E (1964), I Spy (1965), and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) to these?
By contrast, the traditional western seemingly lasted for decades and it was only the previous year that Leone was filming The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the last of his trilogy of hybrids.
1966 was also the year of Blow-Up, another hybrid by an Italian director. And while the main character is not a spy, he does function as a kind of detached American-style detective in swinging London, with his pursuit of a truth only he believes in. And like The Prisoner and Lost, the story does not resolve satisfactorily for many viewers.
The Blow-Up comparison is interesting; I find myself thinking about the paranoid thrillers of the 70s, The Parallax View and The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor; their endings are morally ambiguous, but the viewer isn't left unsure of what actually happened the way we are in these more psychedelic 60s projects. I would argue that such ambiguity is actually a lot more optimistic and hopeful; as Hodgman and Kalan point out in their podcast, there's an infectious goofy joyousness to the final scenes of "Fall Out." Because there's room for interpretation, there are alternatives to the doomy determinism that I now find rather adolescent.
Why is it that some genres follow such a quick glide path into parody? Because of when I was born, the Westerns I first encountered tended to be the revisionist variety (Little Big Man, Silverado) when they weren't outright parodies (Blazing Saddles!). Later I discovered the glories of John Ford and Howard Hawks. Maybe the Western is too capacious to be easily parodied--a genre that can encompass morally ambiguous epic (The Searchers), Rashomon-like explorations of point of view (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) and the hang-out movie (Rio Bravo) surely contains multitudes.
I probably haven’t had a full viewing of The Prisoner since I watched it with my brother on a black and white TV. I recall inscribing in a school notebook something like “I am not a number. I am a free man. (signed) Number 6” to have something to luxuriate in during the day.
I wonder if the response to this show was a gendered thing. I’ll have to ask my sisters if they even remember the title.
Perhaps something as early as The Third Man contains many spy thriller elements, including glorious music, which is perhaps one of the few redeeming qualities of the Bond movies (Shirley Bassey, Paul McCartney). Same with Blow-Up (Yardbirds) and Leone’s movies (Morricone). Not sure what to think of the music in the opening sequence of The Prisoner: effective, I suppose, but not memorable, not whistleable.
Oh very gendered, unquestionably. Though there were female Number Twos in two episodes (Rachel Herbert in "Free for All" and Georgina Cookson in "Many Happy Returns"), which reads as pretty progressive for the time.
Now you have to listen to Be Podding You, if only to listen to Paul F. Tompkins doing his a capella version of the theme song!
The Prisoner means a lot to me, too -- in 1971 or so it was the first cultural experience I shared with my father. I still love the show.
McGoohan was an intensely serious actor (and sometime writer/director) who understandably found the "John Drake" role confining (and refused the role of James Bond). The Prisoner gave him a way to break out within the confines of weekly telly, and to me it seems less akin to a spy spoof or a 1970s big-studio paranoia movie than to the theater of the time. The next-to-last episode, a parody of contemporary psychotherapies, is easy to picture as a one-act on Drury Lane.
Intriguing piece. I would not have connected Lost with The Prisoner since their opening imagery seems so different. Where the Prisoner looks out his window at an exaggerated English holiday village, Jack sees the blank slate of Crusoe’s island. But as a study of a “closed community,” as you term it, and one with a mystery at its heart, it makes perfect sense.
One thing that interests me about The Prisoner is the mini-era when it was made and how it perhaps represents, along with Casino Royale the same year (1967), the end of the spy thriller in its original form. Has a genre ever gone from heyday to parody as quickly as the spy story went from Dr. No (1962), The Man from U.N.C.L.E (1964), I Spy (1965), and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) to these?
By contrast, the traditional western seemingly lasted for decades and it was only the previous year that Leone was filming The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the last of his trilogy of hybrids.
1966 was also the year of Blow-Up, another hybrid by an Italian director. And while the main character is not a spy, he does function as a kind of detached American-style detective in swinging London, with his pursuit of a truth only he believes in. And like The Prisoner and Lost, the story does not resolve satisfactorily for many viewers.
The Blow-Up comparison is interesting; I find myself thinking about the paranoid thrillers of the 70s, The Parallax View and The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor; their endings are morally ambiguous, but the viewer isn't left unsure of what actually happened the way we are in these more psychedelic 60s projects. I would argue that such ambiguity is actually a lot more optimistic and hopeful; as Hodgman and Kalan point out in their podcast, there's an infectious goofy joyousness to the final scenes of "Fall Out." Because there's room for interpretation, there are alternatives to the doomy determinism that I now find rather adolescent.
Why is it that some genres follow such a quick glide path into parody? Because of when I was born, the Westerns I first encountered tended to be the revisionist variety (Little Big Man, Silverado) when they weren't outright parodies (Blazing Saddles!). Later I discovered the glories of John Ford and Howard Hawks. Maybe the Western is too capacious to be easily parodied--a genre that can encompass morally ambiguous epic (The Searchers), Rashomon-like explorations of point of view (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) and the hang-out movie (Rio Bravo) surely contains multitudes.
I probably haven’t had a full viewing of The Prisoner since I watched it with my brother on a black and white TV. I recall inscribing in a school notebook something like “I am not a number. I am a free man. (signed) Number 6” to have something to luxuriate in during the day.
I wonder if the response to this show was a gendered thing. I’ll have to ask my sisters if they even remember the title.
Perhaps something as early as The Third Man contains many spy thriller elements, including glorious music, which is perhaps one of the few redeeming qualities of the Bond movies (Shirley Bassey, Paul McCartney). Same with Blow-Up (Yardbirds) and Leone’s movies (Morricone). Not sure what to think of the music in the opening sequence of The Prisoner: effective, I suppose, but not memorable, not whistleable.
Oh very gendered, unquestionably. Though there were female Number Twos in two episodes (Rachel Herbert in "Free for All" and Georgina Cookson in "Many Happy Returns"), which reads as pretty progressive for the time.
Now you have to listen to Be Podding You, if only to listen to Paul F. Tompkins doing his a capella version of the theme song!