The Screengrab : all night long

Patrick McGoohan, 1928 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Patrick McGoohan, who died this past week at the age of 80, was cooler than the ice in your lemonade. Born in Astoria, New York but raised in Ireland and England, the young McGoohan worked a string of odd jobs before landing at Sheffield Repertory Theatre as stage manager, where he found his true vocation when he was pressed into service to fill in on-stage for an ailing actor. With his striking presence, rounded diction and rapid-fire delivery, he quickly established a name for himself on the English stage, especially after Orson Welles cast him as Starbuck in Welles's celebrated London production based on Moby Dick. (That and a few of McGoohan's other stage performances, including his acclaimed turn in the title role of Ibsen's Brand, were later recorded for TV.) McGoohan was something of a dabbler in movies, where his pleased-pussycat manner and what the critic Peter Rainer once called "perhaps the most villainous enunciation in the history of acting" made him a natural choice for sinister roles. His most notable movie credits included Ice Station Zebra (1968), The Moonshine War (1970), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Scanners (1980), and Silver Streak (1976), where he established his villainous bona fides by calling Richard Pryor a "nigger", in response to which Pryor slapped the taste out of his mouth. After a long absence from the big screen, he had a brief comeback in the mid-90s when Mel Gibson case him in Braveheart (1995) as the vile English king who made no effort to conceal the fact that he did not love his dead gay son. McGoohan followed that up with appearances in The Phantom (1996), as Billy Zane's dad, and the John Grisham potboiler A Time to Kill (1996), where he played a Southern judge with the unreassuring name of Omar Noose. His last movie credit was in 2002, when he did a voice for the animated feature Treasure Planet.

That's the movie stuff covered, because this is a movie site. Of course, it was in television that McGoohan really achieved pop culture immortality. He took his first baby steps towards that goal in 1960 with the first season of the half-hour spy series Danger Man. McGoohan's performance as the quietly dashing international agent John Drake made him a star in Europe, though the series didn't take off when it was first shown in the U.S. However, after the James Bond films struck gold, CBS commissioned a new round of hour-long episodes, which were shown in America under the title Secret Agent, to match the ripping Johnny Rivers theme song that was now attached. (Legend has it that McGoohan had been offered the role of James Bond and turned it down because the murderous, compulsively womanizing 007 struck him as something of a ponce.) By all reports, McGoohan exerted a strong degree of creative control over the John Drake character from the start, insisting that he use violence only as a last resort and keep his mind on his work even when beautiful women were swanning around. (The character was also fallible, capable of entering a situation he'd misjudged and getting himself into real trouble, which then gave McGoohan the chance to dazzle the viewer with Drake's improvisational skills as he proceeded to get himself out of the corner into which he'd painted himself.) McGoohan even gave Drake a slight hint of working-class impudence, in contrast to 007's upper-class snootiness. (In one early episode, a twittery Englishwoman tells him how nice it is to meet a fellow countryman; McGoohan, with his sweetest sneer, replies, "Actually, I'm Irish.") He would have even more of a say about the direction of the series as his fame and power increased. But he wouldn't become one of TV's first auteurs until Danger Man/ Secret Agent ended and McGoohan launched a new series, this time as both star, co-creator/executive producer, and occasionally writer and director, a show that would take a line from that Johnny Rivers song--"They've given you a number/ And taken away your name"--and really go to town with it.

That series was, of course, The Prisoner. Launched in 1967, the seventeen-episode series was a full-blown pop allegory--anyone who called it "science fiction" in front of McGoohan reportedly got to see how high the star could jump and how purple his face could get--which grew out of Danger Man; McGoohan would tell interviewers that he started dreaming about the series while filming the first episodes of that series at the Welsh resort Hotel Portmeirion. ("I thought it was an extraordinary place," he once said, "architecturally and atmosphere-wise, and should be used for something." That "something" began to come into focus when George Markstein, a Danger Man script editor who would become The Prisoner's co-creator, told McGoohan that he'd heard about people being held prisoner in resort-like settings during the second World War. Most episodes of The Prisoner begin with a masterful, thunderously over-the-top prologue, shot and edited with a megalomaniacal brio that makes Gotterdammerung look like Clerks 3, in which McGoohan's character, a nameless government agent, resigns his commission, only to be gassed and wake up in "the village," where people who "know too much" to be allowed to run around loose unsupervised are rechristianed with numbers--our hero is Number Six--and permitted to live out their lives as vacuously as possible in what looks like a seaside Victorian theme park where the rides suck.

The narrative constants of the show, which offered mass-market surrealism and brightly colored Pop Art for the small screen more than twenty years before Twin Peaks, were Number Six's lust to escape the place and the efforts of a constantly reshifting chorus line of "Number Two"s who were hell bent on cracking the "mystery" of why he'd resigned in the first place. Among the show's most memorable visual tropes are the "rovers", white spheres that patrol the shores and engulf those trying to escape by water. In a Village Voice review of the show when it was revived on public television stations in the 1970s, James Wolcott reached back to McGoohan's stage work with Orson Welles and wrote that the rovers looked "like Moby Ovary." (Like John Drake, McGoohan turned out to be quite the improviser; he reportedly came up with the idea of using weather balloons to play the rovers after a more ambitious, mechanical-robot concept proved unusable at the last minute.) Everything about the show, from its slam-bang opening to its proudly incomprehensible finale (written, in the heat of the last moment, by McGoohan himself), was built to attract a cult, and boy, did it get one. (One of the favoite topics of discussion among cultists is, inevitably, whether Number Six was in fact John Drake. McGoohan always maintained that he wasn't, which just may have been his way of showing irritation at the idea that he didn't have it in him to play two entirely different characters.) It also inspired tributes, homages, and parodies too numerous to name, including an episode of The Simpsons in which McGoohan reprised the role of Number Six, or at least his voice.

McGoohan had a few other notable successes on TV, including his starring role as a masked avenger in the three-part 1963 Wonderful World of Disney series The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, A. K. A. Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarcrow. That show may deserve re-examining, though it'll have to be done by someone other than myself, because I saw it when it was re-broadcast many years later when I was five or six, and I am not sure that I want to find out if I would still have the same pants-wetting reaction to seeing McGoohan being menacing in his Scarecrow disguise. (Cillian Murphy, eat your heart out.) In 1977, McGoohan starred in the British medical drama Rafferty. And he became something of a fixture on the set of his friend Peter Falk's series Columbo, playing the special guest murderer in four episodes and directing five, two of which he also wrote and produced. In 1991, he was exceptionally well cast as George Bernard Shaw in the TV film The Best of Friends with John Gielgud and Wendy Hiller. He directed one feature film, Catch My Soul (1974), a rock-musical version of Othello starring Richie Havens, Season Hubley, and Tony Joe White. (Early in his movie career, McGoohan himself had played the Iago figure in the 1961 British curiosity All Night Long, a contemporary retelling of Othello set in the jazz world, with Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck milling in the background.) He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Joan Drummond, an actress he met in his rep theater days; they married between a rehearsal and an evening performance of The Taming of the Shrew. They had three daughters.

Forgotten Films: "All Night Long" (1981)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Gene Hackman turned seventy-eight this past week. Though he seems to have eased into semi-retirement — his last movie appearance was in 2004's Welcome to Mooseport with Ray Romano, a teaming that I assume was a thrill for at least one of them — for decades Hackman was as sturdily dependable as any hard-working character lead turned unlikely movie star in Hollywood history. His birthday provides as good an excuse as any to dig out one of his best performances, in one of his best, and least-appreciated movies, the 1981 comedy All Night Long. It's also a terrific movie to discover at the dawn of a still-new year, because it's about a man who seems to be used up and past the point the point of no return taking the reins and making a new world for himself, by learning in the nick of time to cast off what no longer works for him and doing, and going after, whatever the hell he wants.

Hackman plays George Dupler, whose twenty years of service to the corporate behemoth have driven him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. One day, his stress becomes notable enough that he's encouraged to express what's bothering him, and a chair goes flying through the shiny glass wall of his company's building. A dead man walking, George is shuttled off to serve out his days as night manager of an enormous twenty-four-hour Los Angeles drugstore. The screenwriter, W. D. Richter, apparently took his inspiration from a magazine article about nocturnal urban living as the last great frontier. George has to cross that frontier to build himself a new life; it starts with him adjusting his internal clock to his new working hours, expands to his taking up with the mistress of his teenage son (Dennis Quaid), and winds up with him moving into a loft and embarking on a career as an inventor. His first invention is a new kind of mirror. It doesn't reverse the image of what you're seeing: it gives the user the chance to see what others actually behold when they look at him, the poor sap.

All Night Long has its own eccentric humor and a cool, liberating tone, and it actually got several admiring notices when it was released early in 1981. Unfortunately, it got caught up in internal Hollywood politics and bad marketing decisions, all of them related to the actress who plays George's new squeeze: Barbra Streisand. The movie was directed by the Belgian Jean-Claude Tramont, who was married to the semi-legendary Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, who at the time had Streisand as a star client. The movie had headed into production with the actress Lisa Eichhorn set to play the female lead, but somebody must have thought that having Streisand on board would be good for something, with the result that she was nudged into the role, the film's budget ballooned accordingly, and the finished product was released with an ad campaign that seemed designed to call up memories of previous comic horrors such as For Pete's Sake and The Main Event. Tramont's career never recovered from the movie's high-profile commercial failure; he would direct only once more — As Summers Die, a 1986 TV film with Bette Davis, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Scott Glenn — before dying in 1996. The funny thing is that Streisand neither makes nor sinks the movie; her quirky-mouse performance is amusing — you can see her consciously trying not to come across as a diva — but she and Hackman have zero chemistry. Their romance just seems like a fling he uses to cushion his fall as he transitions into a new life; you can't imagine they'll be together for long after the final credits roll. But if All Night Long is compromised as a love story, as a tribute to a loser who didn't know how to lie down, it's richly satisfying. Tramont, Richter, and Hackman started out with the quirky tools of classic screwball comedy and applied them with so much heartfelt grace and imagination that they constructed a comedy worthy of Rilke's dictum, "You must change your life!"

The Rep Report (January 11-15)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.

Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)

NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.