#WTW: The Prisoner

(#WhatThomWatched Number Fifteen....)

The Prisoner

(1967-1968, Don Chaffey/Pat Jackson/Patrick McGoohan/David Tomblin; A&E Home Video disc set)

This singular television program ran on BBC competitor channel ITV (the “I” is for “independent”) for 17 episodes. It set a bar for how challenging a show can be that has rarely been passed since. It’s not fully successful, but it’s never less than provocative and far-reaching. Unlike most television, it is the creative vision of a single person — Patrick McGoohan, its creator and star, author or co-author of some episodes, credited or uncredited director of others. Some of the episodes still rank with the finest television shows ever broadcast; some fail now only because their tricks or themes have been copied so many times since then; and still others fail because they represent such a huge conceptual reach that audiences then (and still now) can’t find its wavelength. But it’s always, at any point, thoroughly entertaining.

The Prisoner has a simple conceit: In the opening credits (with no audible dialogue, over a driving theme from Ron Grainer, also the composer of the iconic Doctor Who theme), the protagonist steers his mod convertible into a London parking garage, storms into a secure office with a letter of resignation, and causes a desk-pounding, teacup-spilling scene. He then speeds home with the proverbial smile-playing-about-his-lips, too focused on his upcoming island vacation to note the black hearse and top-hatted men following him. After being gassed and abducted, he wakes up in a posh apartment to discover that, along with hundreds of other (presumably) former spies and intelligence assets of unspecified nations and political orientations, he is a prisoner of the Village. This is apparently some sort of organized retirement for folks who served god-and-country and are too dangerous (or are too tempting as targets) to live freely, but our man chafes at the forced anonymity — each resident is known only by an assigned code number — and at the authority figures’ one repeated question for him: Why did he decide to resign? Now known only as Number Six, he explores the comfortable confines of the genteel (and escape-resistant) Village while being subjected to a series of complex mind games designed to wrest the answer from him, unsure at any moment who he can trust but always bedeviled by his lead jailor/torturer/inquisitor, Number Two. It’s a nigh-perfect hook for an episodic show, although its creators were wise to limit it to 17 installments — the hero can stay ahead of the captors, but he still has to lose every week — he cannot escape.

Over this premise McGoohan and co-creators George Markstein and David Tomblin layered an almost absurd (and often absurdist) amount of surrealistic detail, often choosing the boldest and least-expected visual over a more conventional one even at the expense of the narrative. This includes Village residents in incongruous costumes essaying incongruous leisure activities, a silent cadre of efficient henchmen-and-women who appear to arrange things behind the scenes, surveillance footage viewable by the leadership which can include any location and shots from improbable camera angles, a bevy of mysterious instrument panels and sinister contraptions, endless syringes and shots forcibly given which convey any magical outcome (up to and including switching two persons’ selves into the other bodies), and so on.

And typical to the show’s tone, lead antagonist Number Two is played by a different actor each week; as time goes on it becomes clear that each leader’s failure to break Number Six is resulting in them being replaced by some impenetrable management structure (Number One, possibly?), but for the first several episodes this is just another in a pile-up of disorienting detail which keeps us just as confused as Six. 

It's a feast, visually, and one that continually rewards careful watching. Signs and posters in the background feature Orwellian slogans, all rendered in the Victorian font used throughout the Village. Costumes are opulent and colorful and often dress residents in contrast to their actual functions. And many scenes are blocked and framed to emphasize confusion, mysterious purpose, and layers of reality; the shot below, taken from the key location of Number Two's control room, is a good example of this: facilitated communication via multiple devices; machinery with mysterious purpose, often (as here) outscaling its human operators; and reality interacting with mitigated reality on giant screens:

Watching the documentary that comes with the A&E 40th anniversary disc set (Don’t Knock Yourself Out, from 1997), it’s clear that not everyone associated with the show is on the same page about McGoohan (who does not participate). The series is indelible because of where it goes in the last several episodes, which were completely taken over by McGoohan; some of his colleagues think he was a genius who knew exactly what he was doing, and others speculate that he deliberately took the series off the rails because he was stuck — but there’s no doubt that what he did is unique, compelling, and an honest attempt to say something (and be) different. The last two episodes are still bracing and unexpected when viewed today. The Prisoner was clearly highly influential in many ways, and yet the ending doesn’t resemble anything else on television then or now — it’s closer to a highly intellectualized theater piece.

Reminds me of:

Stylish British 1960’s secret-agent shows, at least at first — obviously I’m reminded of my childhood public television discovery of The Avengers and all those kinky John Steed and Emma Peel costumes (even the Catherine Gale years had an indelible impact on impressionable minds). Those shows were flashier and less ideological but they still seemed to push the limits of television. 

That’s superficial, though: It’s more interesting to consider which other dramatic series have been so much a product of an auteur with a singular vision. David Lynch’s 1990-1991 run of Twin Peaks not only held a similar cachet but was also very peculiar (almost beyond reason) and also let down a large percentage of its fan base when it could not bring all of its story threads and themes to a satisfyingly neat conclusion. The last few episodes of Prisoner at least manage to say exactly what its auteur McGoohan wanted to say: some of the passages are nonsensical, but others have undeniable power, with imagery as fine as any the series has to offer — and all of them would be unthinkable as a conventional product of television-by-committee.

When The Prisoner was originally airing in Britain, it would inevitably have played on the public’s fervor for and familiarity with the previous Danger Man series, in which McGoohan played secret agent John Drake. McGoohan can certainly play other roles and could have created a distinct agent character, but instead he seems to be deliberately and cannily connecting his previous project to this one. Many actors from Danger Man show up again here; the deeply researched Danger Man fansite identifies fifty-six such crossovers, though in no case can an actor be definitively said to be playing the same character in each show. Of course that didn’t stop the theorist-fans from finding connections that “prove” Danger Man’s John Drake is Number Six — after all, any former colleagues or opponents that Drake might have known would be similarly under alias or assigned a number in the Village of The Prisoner. Even without considering the earlier show, the heavy reuse of actors and very few recurring roles (with just a couple of exceptions) adds to the sense of disorientation.

But then — the guilt!

I’d never seen Danger Man and my experience of watching The Prisoner really made me fall for McGoohan. I’m now eager to see it and fortunately for me Shout! Factory did a new DVD set a few months ago which includes all of the earlier shows — literally, two different but tightly related British series (39 half-hour episodes between 1960-1962 and then 47 hour-long episodes in a revamped format from 1964-1967; confusingly called Secret Agent in their U.S. runs). I understand that it’s frothier and more conventional, but even the possibility that his character John Drake is destined to become Number Six makes me want to see it. Though note: At 17 discs, it’ll be a while before the #WTW comes out.

I’d also like to start seeking out some of McGoohan’s film performances. Silver Streak (where he plays the big bad) was one of my favorite films as a kid, but I don’t remember him over the Pryor and Wilder shenanigans. I also noticed the other day that The Quare Fellow, one of those items in my Netflix streaming queue which appeared there at some point in the past (so long ago that I can’t remember why — I’m sure you have yours too) is a starring role for McGoohan from 1962 — I will bump it just a smidge upward in my eventual inevitability index. (And yes, I realize he’s in Scanners. Which has a new Criterion edition, spine #712.)

Pitch:

It takes a bit to warm up to McGoohan here — he’s prickly, self-righteous and uncompromising. But you can’t take your eyes off him. Give him an episode and a half and you’ll be hooked. The middle eight or so stand with the best television episodes in existence, and even with the problems that start to crop up, you’ll want to stay tuned through the sometimes bitter end.

<< L'Atalante (-) Certified Copy >>

#WTW: L'Atalante

(#WhatThomWatched nº 14...)

L’Atalante

(1934, Jean Vigo; Criterion spine #578, from The Complete Jean Vigo)

It’s startling to consider that this, Vigo’s only full-length film after two shorts that jabbed at the establishment, wasn’t even a project he wanted to do. It was what a studio offered him and his financial backer, a corny script with a mildly interesting conceit: What if a village girl were to be swept off her feet by a young barge captain floating through town, ran away from her family, and found herself adjusting to married life on a tiny boat with a salty first mate, a foolish cabin boy, and innumerable feral cats and kittens sharing her impossibly tiny personal space? Vigo himself was apparently highly dubious. And then he shot off from that hackneyed idea and created an utter masterpiece, beloved by romantics and cynics alike, studied frame-by-frame by filmmakers ever since. He did this with a handful of extremely talented collaborators, sure, but he also was working under a death sentence, passing away from tuberculosis at 29 just as the film was nearing its final edit.

A good older foreign movie is worthy of respect and study, but this reaches across 80 years and grabs you, laughing, by both shoulders. Yes, part of this stems from inescapable awareness of the tragedy of Vigo’s short life, but it’s more than that — the visual experimentation, the palpable joy of the actors (especially mate Michel Simon and bride Dita Parlo), the satisfying story beats; it all feels completely modern, possibly because great filmmakers have been continually inspired by Vigo across decades. It’s an incredibly simple story once Parlo is on the boat with new husband Jean Dasté: She makes the best of the cramped conditions, with some of the inconvenience salved by the balm of new love; a rare trip ashore with Dasté proves that he’s a touch less social than she; and when she ventures off the boat again for some innocent fun alone, her new husband, jealous, steams off without her. Simon, with whom she’s bonded earlier, conspires to find her and bring her back. That’s it — the complications hardly rise to the level of a sitcom episode. But the details are what makes the film unforgettable, especially Simon. His Père Jules is an unruly, profane force of nature, the source of most of the comedy and a lot of the heart of the show, and the bits are inspired even when viewed today; for example, the circa-2011 meme of table flipping (where a person turns over a table to stop a game in progress when it’s not going their way) makes an appearance here.

Clearly this is a key film about marriage, turning the universal fear about binding your life with someone else’s and losing your own sense of identity into an externalized situation — the barge. The ways in which Vigo shows us both ineffable joy and simultaneous uncertainty are immensely clever: the newlyweds exult in just holding each other, alternately embracing and looking into each other’s eyes, in long takes that encourage us to forget about actors acting and believe that the emotions are real; the husband stalks his bride abovedeck like a cat; and at one point they fall into a game where they are back to back and trying to lift the other off the ground. It’s foolish and silly on the one hand, and yet that very ridiculousness makes it seem even truer. Parlo loves the romance of the boat but you can see how she begins to long for just a little time onshore; Dasté clearly wants to indulge her but it’s also obvious that he’s uncomfortable with the crowds and gaiety at the nightclub he takes her to, and only breathes easy when he’s back. It’s easy to criticize the movie for not having an operatic plot or giant emotional incidents, but that completely misses what’s happening: the tiny, universal adjustments and disappointments that any relationship forces, the inevitable arguments and the self-righteousness that each spouse feels, the shock of realizing that your life is already starting to bind to another’s and that walking away doesn’t bring any relief, and the comfort that can result if these compromises are made and embraced — this is what Vigo has, miraculously, put on the screen.

Reminds me of:

So continuing the point above, the relationship-commitment aspect of this story reminded me of my favorite (to date) movie-marriage-metaphor, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna). Granted, L’Atalante is scrupulously realistic and not a fantastical metaphor — in Woman, the male character is literally trapped at the bottom of an ever-growing sand pit by his initial impulse to help a stranger — but there is a similar full-force recognition of what marriage feels like and what it becomes over time.

Having seen the lethal-love-triangle-on-a-barge movie Young Adam back in 2003 (with Tilda Swinton having her head turned from lout husband Peter Mullan to the younger lout Ewan McGregor), there’s no way for me to avoid mentioning the connection. (Writer/director David Mackenzie names the barge “Atlantic Eve”; is he cynically connecting the loveless Swinton/Mullan marriage to an imagined fate of the Parlo/Dasté characters, the “eve” of their relationship?) Young Adam is also a fine movie but it could not be more different in tone; where it uses the confined barge spaces for dread and as a metaphor for imprisonment, L’Atalante compares the same spaces to the willfully entered “prison” of a relationship.

This is another one of those early sound movies where sound is an integral part of the plot — I’m thinking of Lang’s M, with the killer’s whistling, or even the stomach-gurgling gag in Chaplin’s Modern Times. In this case, while Parlo is having her “lost weekend” walkabout in the city, her desire to listen to “Song of the Bargemen” leads her to a public record parlor, where her song choice playing over the speakers on the street leads Simon to her in turn. And of course one of the film’s best and most modern gags — which works just as well now as it ever has — finds Simon running his index finger along a record’s grooves in his cabin, sadly and nostalgically, as we hear the strains of the music rise on the soundtrack — only to realize on the reverse shot that the cabin boy is playing an accordion on the bunk opposite. That’s a sophisticated joke, and one made less than a decade after movie sound had been invented.

And here’s one that was brain-twisting for me, at least: When I was preparing my stills for this #WTW post, I was struck at how often I found myself wanting to pair the pictures up, to show how a shot flowed or how one commented on the previous. Then other pairs which I hadn’t captured jumped to mind, like the payoff of the Pere Jules record player scene, or the panning shots along the barge, or the famous cross-cutting of the separated spouses tossing and turning in two different beds. I haven’t had this impulse with the stills from any of the prior films, which made me wonder: Maybe this tells us something about Vigo? An uncanny sense of visual flow? An ability to think in terms of serial shots and how their presentation affects the audience?

And all of a sudden I remembered something that I hadn’t thought about in years: One of my personal seminal moments of film awareness happened when I was very young, a pre-teen; I was a voracious reader and my local library allowed me to hang out and browse in the adult stacks (thank you, Ms. Sandy the children’s librarian!). Somehow I got my hands on Amos Vogel’s  Film as a Subversive Art. If you know that book — still one of the most important reference works for film, and I bought my own copy as an adult — you know why I don’t keep it lying around for my own three kids to find; it is a full list of avant-garde and disruptive works of world cinema up to that date (1973), illustrated with copious stills, many of a disturbing nature. My own adult quest to seek out (and own) great classics is highly informed by Vogel, even though I often forget that fact. (I’m sure it will come up again as #WTW continues.) At any rate, I suddenly realized where I’d run into Vigo originally, and forgotten: in Vogel, and branded on my 12-year-old mind’s eye forever, is a still from his first film À propos de Nice, a sly “documentary” of the French town of Nice that’s really an acerbic commentary disguised as a sunny “city film.” In that short, as the various silent shots of life in Nice begin to turn satirical, there’s a “ladies’ fashion” segment in which we see a matronly woman modeling her of-the-moment outfit, lounging in a deck chair. Vigo then cross-fades into a shot of the model wearing another outfit, then another and another. At the end of the sequence, the final fade is into the woman sitting completely naked. There’s no narration or titles in the movie, but Vigo’s intent is clear — it’s a joke on the rich and fashionable, an “emperor-has-no-clothes” riff (hmm, one repeated wholesale in Altman’s problematic Prêt-à-Porter from 1994, now that I think about it). And in the Vogel book, to lead off the chapter “International Left and Revolutionary Cinema” (p. 120), he’s selected two stills from À propos — one with and one sans clothing. It’s probably the only film in the book that gets two stills. So I might have good company in my inability to distill Vigo into a single image.

Note that I’m not mentioning Vigo’s other masterpiece because I’ve already decided — about two seconds after L’Atalante ended — to rewatch Zéro de conduite again as soon as possible for a #WTW. The anarchy present in a film like Zéro clearly influenced many other films, but with L’Atalante there’s a sublimely light touch and fewer obvious elements to copy. (That said, I see some Wes Anderson borrowings in his films’ collections of stuff, most obviously from Père Jules’s cabin crammed full of signifying objects, right up to a puppet theater.)

But then — the guilt!

This is one of those movies where if you had told me that no one in it was a professional actor, I’d have believed it, especially Michel Simon. But of course that’s ludicrous — Simon is one of the great French actors of his time. Yet in part of my brain Père Jules actually lived on a barge in the 1930’s and is probably still there, grumping up and down the canal, sticking a kitten or two on his shoulders and cuffing the cabin boy. He literally strips to show Parlo his life of misadventure, mapped out in terribly crude, touchingly naive tattoos on his body. How could this man just be acting? But of course he was, and it was only when I was looking up some facts for this piece that I realized I’ve seen him and all the others before: Simon and Parlo are in The Grand Illusion; Dasté is in Zéro de conduite; he and Simon are in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, and so on. I’ll be watching for these folks the next time I see these other films (but I won’t be surprised if I don’t recognize them)!

Pitch:

Wow, this is just a beautiful film. David Thomson is quoted all over the web (from his 2008 book “Have You Seen…?”) as having called it “not so much a masterpiece as a definition of cinema.” It’s poetry transformed into sound and images. I don’t think it matters at all whether a given person cares to experience L’Atalante for themselves, because even if they “don’t like” old or foreign or French or recovered or subtitled or black-and-white or romantic or (deceptively) simple films, whatever it is they do think they “like” is inherently informed by Vigo’s work, defined (as Thomson indicates) by it. Inescapably. Watch Parlo’s face fall as she sees the barge for the first time, forlornly standing at the bank in her wedding dress; then watch her clown and flirt around with her new husband; then watch her stride along the barge on that first day in the sun; you are watching the essence of what movies are for.

<< The Friends of Eddie Coyle (-) The Prisoner >>

#WTW: The Friends of Eddie Coyle

(Hoorah, it's an even odd #WhatThomWatched baker's dozen . . .)

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

(1973, Peter Yates; Criterion spine 475)

If a viewer had never seen Robert Mitchum in any other movie, what would they think of him based on this performance? He’s a loser, two-bit, defeated, sort of weasely; once a master safecracker (known as “Fingers”) and yet now with crushed and broken hands, working the outside edges of his remaining underworld contacts, acting as a middleman to supply hoods with the one-time-use guns they need to pull their bank jobs. He talks (and talks) a good game — well, he thinks he does; he pushes an old-timer tough-guy act on his young supplier (who’s just another middleman farther down the chain); he hangs around his former haunts in an attempt to stay in touch; and, most critically, he tries to build himself up into a position of relevance to an undercover agent in an effort to clear himself of a jail sentence. It’s at least one too many “friends” to balance. 

Meanwhile, the movie shows a kind of grim 1970’s Boston that isn’t usually depicted in a crime movie — instead of a vibrant city or even a grimy one, there’s rundown suburban spaces, with clandestine meetings in endless sad parks, remote train platforms, faceless parking lots, and after-hours gravel pits. There’s a running visual theme of men in cars spying on events in the street and on each other, and then when they meet to talk in person, they talk about cars. (The payoff to that one is Peter Boyle’s bartender character, who holds some central locus of information and power in the underworld’s matrix but doesn’t know how to drive.)

Eddie Coyle is one of the indisputably great (if oddly overlooked) downbeat movies of the early-1970’s American realism movement, so the audience never expects things to end well. But it has so many grace notes, many of them centered on Mitchum, including his aforementioned attempts to mentor the gunrunner (Stephen Keats), his concern with keeping the heists incident-free if possible, and a simple, touching domestic scene with his wife (Helena Carroll). Mitchum seems to physically shrink into himself as if he’s trying to fade into the background and out of notice; even as it becomes clear that no amount of snitching is going to satisfy Richard Jordan’s agent, he continues to look for a new angle. Whatever loquacious magic allowed him to escape his earlier misadventures with only a set of broken fingers is at its last ebb here. And Mitchum isn’t the only actor at the top of his game: Keats has a mesmerizing magnetism; he’s fantastic to watch. Jordan moves from blandly friendly and jocular into, eventually, chilling disregard. Boyle is as great as always, and so on — there are eight or nine more excellent character actors in the ensemble. They play Eddie’s immediate contacts in an implied, much larger web of criminals and stoolies, encompassing both the savvy and jaded (the three members of the bank heist team, slipping on their new set of one-time masks for the next job like they’re clocking in for their factory shift) and the even younger newbies, the green wanna-bes who are just getting started (the kids selling stolen rifles, the baby-faced couple working out of their windowless van). 

In every instance, and even in the case of the undercover cops, each person seems unwilling to do any more than their tiny piece of work; each wants to be the smallest possible cog in the crime machine. Contrast this with the many movie depictions of criminals (and especially bank robbers) as public figures, vigilantes just as interested in notoriety as cash, who see themselves as avengers of their society’s ill-dealing to them or their class — Bonnie and Clyde, Gun Crazy, Honeymoon Killers, Natural Born Killers. Mitchum’s role as the weapons middleman emphasizes both his unimportance and also the idea of (loosely) organized crime as a kind of bureaucracy; whereas organized organized crime movies (the Godfather trilogy, The Yakuza, Goodfellas, even Youth of the Beast) show the Mafia or the Yakuza as a family and as a societal order which trumps the government’s order. Crime in Eddie Coyle is filled with misinformation, broken contacts, and infiltrations from undercover police who hardly even need informants to make their collars.

Mitchum was an old-time movie star, with plenty of great movies but plenty more where he could just be his big ol’ self up on that screen. (Many of his movies were both.) In The Friends of Eddie Coyle he shows just how superb an actor he really was, creating a one-of-a-kind character among some of the finest character actors of his day. Anyone who thinks that Mitchum was always “playing himself” on screen is dead wrong; Q.E.D.

Reminds me of:

Film scholar and director Kent Jones’ Criterion booklet essay makes the point that no one should mourn the fact that movies like this aren’t made anymore because there are no other movies like it. And it’s true that it is surprisingly difficult to find film parallels to Coyle. There’s no outrageous colors, images or cuts like in a Tarantino or Suzuki crime film. There’s no bloody showdown ending in which, a la Hamlet, various factions mow each other down like in L. A. Confidential or a revisionist Peckinpah (or Eastwood) western. There’s no stylized heightened genre dialog evoking films of another era, like a Coen brothers film or something written by Elmore Leonard. If the characters didn’t talk as much as they do, it would be comparable to one of those great French or Swedish films about a character’s world where we watch them go about their business without explanations, like Bresson’s Pickpocket or Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. But Eddie and his friends do talk, with some of the best naturalistic dialog ever, courtesy of George V. Higgins’s source novel.

The most recent #WTW that involved bank heists was obviously Thieves Like Us; these two films are set in very different eras but are similar in their pared-down approach to showing how the crimes are executed. Both also show a successful job first so that the audience is oriented to the gang’s modus operandi before having subsequent jobs introduce issues. Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, with its single, interminable bank job that turns into a siege, is never far from my mind when watching any robbery in a film; there, we have so much time to consider the inner states of the robbers, the bank manager and the employees, and the police that it almost becomes a kind of universal back-story for the terser, usually close to wordless iterations in films like Coyle.

But then — the guilt!

Peter Yates was a British director with a wide range of notable movies including several which, like the Boston of Coyle, embody American towns and regions: Breaking Away, about competitive cyclists in central Indiana, is a great example; there’s also the San Francisco streets of Bullitt, the Los Angeles of the comedy Mother, Jugs & Speed, or the late-sixties New York singles scene of John and Mary. I haven’t seen Breaking Away in twenty years and I’ve never seen the others. (Though one of my favorite films as a kid was his The Hot Rock with Robert Redford, and I own that one. I’ll leave you all to shake your heads sadly at the guy who was first in line to buy The Hot Rock and yet has never seen Bullitt.)

Similarly: Mitchum was a highly prolific actor. I’ve got some choice Mitchum in my collection: will likely have to double-dip someday and pick up another (the Criterion) copy of the amazing The Night of the Hunter, and I have one of his two turns as Phillip Marlowe in my D-I-Y Marlowe collection (mentioned back in #WTW 4) . . . but there are so many more. He sings in What a Way to Go! (and others), has a drop-dead impressive accent in The Sundowers (Australian) and Ryan’s Daughter (Irish) (and many others!), and can do comedy just as well as he can do tough-guy. His Dick Cavett interview (collected on Shout Factory’s The Dick Cavett Show: Hollywood Greats, sadly out of print) is a fantastic late-career interview for him; he’s funny and smart. So many more Mitchum performances to seek out.

Pitch:

I love every frame of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. (I must not be alone — Stephen Keats’s character is named Jackie Brown, after all.) You’ll know if you’re going to be similarly bewitched after the early scene between Keats and Mitchum where they talk in the first of many coffee-shop conversations: 

“One of us is going to have a big fat problem. And another thing: If anyone is going to have a problem, you’re gonna be the one.”

<< Inherent Vice (Glance) (-) L'Atalante >>