Peace...!
i dont really know how to introduce
PATRICK McGOOHAN or even the series ive been watching lately. let me just say this; he was the 1st choice to play the character "007" in Ian Fleming's
JAMES BOND but they
had to settle for SEAN CONNERY...!..yep, i said it...
im re-watching a series called "
PRISONER"...watching it again, i have a renewed level of respect for
PATRICK McGOOHAN, in as far as
script, concept, execution and over all contribution to film/series/television goes... the man is indeed a GODFATHER of among many things, the
SPY THRILLER genre...
a
SYNOPSIS"This exchange hails from the original British series,
The Prisoner (
1967), in which Patrick McGoohan, playing a character named Number Six, finds himself imprisoned in an old-style village. The opening sequence of the series has him driving around London in a fast car, driving up to his employer’s desk and slapping down a letter of resignation. He has been brought to this presumably secluded village because he has valuable information — what this information is, we don’t know. We also don’t know McGoohan’s occupation. All we know is that he’s trapped because he’s left his job, and he wants to leave.
(When the original series premiered, many viewers a**umed, and perhaps were meant to a**ume, that McGoohan’s character was John Drake, whom he played in another British import, Danger Man (Secret Agent). This, however, was left ambiguous in The Prisoner, though American media magazines like Time and TV Guide stated the two were one in the same.)
Who is the prisoner? Who are his captors? What information does he hold? Will he ever be free? Now that AMC is remaking The Prisoner, viewers will have another chance to find out. Though, of course, they won’t. Nevertheless, in the age of Lost and Flash Forward, the remake of The Prisoner may be right on time, instead of light years ahead of it, as it was in 1967.
The original series, best remembered for its ambiguity, cinematic techniques, and thought-provoking final episode, plays heavily on the fears of its time. It’s steeped in the rhetoric of the Cold War. The village is the commune, or the communist society, where names don’t matter and everyone pretends to be happy in public but is miserable in secret. Though all of their needs are provided for, there is no joy, and the only hope of climbing the social ladder is to be given a position by authorities. The philosophical and psychological drama of the show is whether McGoohan is in fact a free, autonomous individual — “my life is my own” — or whether he in fact is “a number” (communist!) not a “person.”
if you can get your hands on this
PRISONER, check it out, you might like it too...