The Cities of That Remote Land Are Not Touched by Modern Civilisation (The Blue Veil)

location:  Secret Agent AKA Danger Man: The Complete Collection, disc 1

airdate:  2 October 1960

NATO opening:  yes

NATO openings so far:  2

NATO-less openings so far:  2

Vacation spoiled: no

Vacations spoiled so far: 1

By contrast with the past three episodes, we begin not with a murder but with Drake arriving in a desert location by helicopter, accompanied by Drake’s own voiceover explaining his mission: investigating the slave trade carried on by “Tuaregs” in “Arabia.”  Inasmuch as the Tuaregs are native to northern Africa, whereas Arabia is a subcontinent of Asia, this episode really takes place in a kind of orientalist neverland, with most of the major tropes reliably checked off.  (The “blue veil” of the title is another Tuareg reference [and not a nod to the Jane Wyman movie], but is never mentioned in the actual episode; it may have a double meaning in Drake’s disguise, especially since in Tuareg culture it is traditionally men, rather than women, who are so veiled.)

Drake’s chief adversaries are the local ruler or “moukta” (an older Westernised spelling of “mukhtar” or “muhtar,” meaning an elected village chieftain, which does not seem to describe this wealthy and sinister feudal lord – played by Ferdinand Mayne, who will spend much of his later career playing vampires), and an English slaver “gone native,” with the decidedly inappropriate name of Spooner (a deliciously reptilian performance by Laurence Naismith), who is referred to as “the Fat Man” in an amalgamated homage to Sidney Greenstreet’s character in Casablanca and moniker in The Maltese Falcon. (Spooner refers to Muslim polygamy with the quintessentially English phrase “custom of the country” – I’m thinking of the jurisprudential meaning, not the Jacobean play, though I suppose the latter might be more apt here.  Of course having six wives is not actually the Muslim custom, but artistic license is compassionate and merciful.)  Drake’s (initially grudging) allies are a stranded showgirl whom Spooner is trying to acquire for the moukta’s harem, and a street urchin (with a venomous snake down his shirt) who pledges his service to Drake in exchange for sparing his life.  (Spooner tells the showgirl that women require a protector, and unfortunately nothing in the episode suggests otherwise; she merely trades up in protectors.)

But in this episode the plot is really just a showcase for McGoohan’s delightfully hammy tour de force performance as Drake’s undercover persona, a scruffy “desert rat” (whose antics bear more than a passing resemblance to those of the previous episode’s chuckleheaded millionaire; there’s a goofy smile that McGoohan rarely gives Drake except when Drake is playing a role).  McGoohan’s every move, gesture, and twitch in this episode are riveting to watch.  If the prologue feels rushed, that’s because its job is to get itself over with as quickly as possible in order to get the desert-rat act onstage.  (And ditto, mutatis mutandis, for the ending.)

Smart co-wrote this one with Don Ingalls, best known in sf circles for the Star Trek episodes “The Alternative Factor” and “A Private Little War,” and less happily for, well, this.  (Incidentally, the lighting in this episode is especially effective, for which credit is presumably due either to director Charles Frend or to cinematographer Brendan Stafford.)

This time around Drake is working for the U.N., and is explicitly identified as being American; and once again, as previously, American and/or western intervention is a force for good in a benighted third-world country.  The salutary cynicism of The Prisoner is not yet with us.  All the same, the emphasis put on Drake’s being an “unbeliever” in this episode seems to go beyond merely making the point that he’s not a Muslim; it seems to suggest, positively, that he sees through illusions where others do not, and negatively, that he has not fully committed himself to any particular allegiance – both traits that point forward.

Be seeing you!

Foreigners Coming Here and Interfering In Our Politics (Josetta)

location:  Secret Agent AKA Danger Man: The Complete Collection, disc 1

airdate:  25 September 1960

NATO opening:  no

NATO openings so far:  1

NATO-less openings so far:  2

Vacation spoiled: no

Vacations spoiled so far: 1

We begin with a blast of sound and a flurry of colourful floats – a carnival, or indeed Carnaval, atmosphere.  Then we shift to a woman at a piano, playing the Fantaisie Impromptu – not the opening allegro agitato, but the succeeding moderato cantabile, as though to emphasise the contrast between the frenzy without and the calm within (a boundary that will shortly be broken).  We realise she is blind when she reaches forward to touch her braille sheet music.  A man arrives; she invites him to let himself in (the doors aren’t even locked against what lies without).  As they chat pleasantly, he takes a gun from his jacket, a gun she cannot see ....

Our episode is set in the city of San Pablo, in an unnamed country in Latin America.  (Though we’re not told so explicitly, it seems likely that San Pablo is the country’s capital.  Most Latin America countries have a San Pablo, but in no case as the capital – so unlike last time there is no obvious candidate for the unnamed country.)  Drake is here quite explicitly as a representative of the U.S., speaking of “my government” and “our embassy” in connection with it – no talk of NATO this time.  (Yet he pronounces “lieutenant” the British way – a mistake on the actor’s part, probably, but it contributes nicely to the ongoing vagueness of Drake’s identity.)  And he has come to San Pablo to identify an assassin, in order to prove that the assassination was not a U.S. plot.

So, a forward-looking subject matter, since the succeeding decade would be an especially fertile period for CIA assassination plots in Latin America – though the 1954 Guatemala coup (inter alia) would have been a relatively fresh memory, even if the extent of U.S. involvement was not as widely understood at the time as it would be later on.  Of course the notion of the U.S. trying to prevent a right-wing military coup, and to avenge a slain left-wing politician of whom Drake admits his government disapproved, is a little hard to swallow, even in 1960.  At least the regime that Drake is helping to prop up is not portrayed in too rosy a light; though the police chief (appropriately named Segur, as in seguridad) is Drake’s ally and thus presumably a good guy, he tells Drake matter-of-factly that he will arrange to have a pliable judge hear his case.

All the same, in this episode we see little of the moral ambiguity that pervaded “Time to Kill.”  Here Drake is the good guy, and America is the good guy too; both are framed for crimes of which they are innocent, and both are vindicated.  

Nevertheless,  since my aim in this project is to read Danger Man through the lens of The Prisoner, it’s worth pointing out that although Drake evidently believes that the U.S. is devoid of complicity in the killing of Ingres’s brother, we have no proof that he is right; that Cortez committed the act hardly settles the question of whom he was ultimately working for (“Who is Number One?”), and so we can just as easily view Drake’s mission as one of covering up a U.S. plot rather than disproving one.  Cortez himself might well not know the identity of his ultimate masters, and so might be perfectly sincere in telling Drake he wants Americans to butt out of his country’s affairs, even as he has been their useful idiot all along.  If the killing has led to more anti-American agitation than had been anticipated, the real fear of Drake’s superiors might be the potential success of the agitators, rather than (as they claim) the army coup the agitation might provoke.  Drake can thus be seen as a useful idiot in his own right, a cleanup man sent to defuse a left-wing threat while being led to believe he is defusing a right-wing threat.  (Imagine if Drake were to find this out later.  One can almost picture him striding angrily down a hallway and into a government office, to resign ….)

Apart from the political aspects, the episode’s main plot concerns an attempt to spook the suspected assassin into giving himself away by convincing him that the sole earwitness to his crime is also an eyewitness – a tricky job, since the witness in question, Josetta Ingres, is the blind woman with whom we opened.  (So, another pairing with a woman, though again no romance – other than the slight hint of it in the way Drake kisses Ingres’s hand at the end, though that can be read just as easily as congratulations on a job well done.)

The idea that a blind person’s recognising a voice (and scent) is less reliable evidence than a sighted person’s recognising a face is of course absurd; but it’s not the show’s absurdity (the episode makes a point of showing, more than once, that Ingres’s hearing is more discriminating than that of a sighted person), but rather a plausibly realistic absurdity of the legal system. 

Ingres feigns sightedness by having Drake watch her from a distance and relay instructions to a speaker in her ear.  I worry that in reality, especially with so little opportunity to practice, this would work about as well as Leonard Read’s flyswatter game, which Rose Wilder Lane describes as follows:

Leonard ... has devised a parlor game, in his effort to get the definition [of liberty] into another head .... The game requires two persons, one fly-swatter and a fly.  One person holds the swatter, but can move only as the other person tells him to move; the object of both is to swat the fly.  This cannot be done, of course.  (The Lady and the Tycoon, p. 31)

But it works well in the story – and (probably inadvertently) doubles as a metaphor for the American style of imperialism: not direct conquest, but the illusion of autonomy, with vigorous direction behind the scenes.  Thus the real Drake personifies the private face of American foreign policy, just as Drake’s amusing impersonation of a wealthy, feckless, clueless gambler personifies its public face.

Be seeing you!

We Girls Always Like To Be Taken Seriously (Time to Kill)

location:  Secret Agent AKA Danger Man: The Complete Collection, disc 1

airdate:  18 September 1960

NATO opening:  yes

NATO openings so far:  1

NATO-less openings so far:  1

Vacation spoiled: no

Vacations spoiled so far: 1

[As always:  SPOILERS BELOW.]

Never trust a woman. – The Prisoner, “Dance of the Dead”

You, me, handcuffs: must it always end this way? – Another show entirely

A professor at a party reaches for the mango chutney and falls dead, a bullet through his heart. 

Another Clemens script – this time in collaboration with Ian Stuart Black, who was also the show’s associate producer, and who would go on to pen several more episodes in the first series.  (He’s perhaps better known today as the writer of the Doctor Who episodes “The Savages,” “The War Machines,” and “The Macra Terror.”)  Showrunner Ralph Smart directs this time.  Effective location shooting (Wales again, standing in for Hungary), and fancy props like a helicopter, are indicative of the show’s relatively large budget by 1960 British standards.  These early episodes feature voiceover narration by the protagonist, a device that rarely works well, and doesn’t work well here – but everything else does.

The dead chutney fancier is Dr. Barkoff, a defector from an unnamed but evidently Soviet-bloc country; the killer is Hans Vogeler, an agent of a rogue intelligence service in that country; and Drake is assigned to track Vogeler down.  His task is complicated by a Swedish schoolteacher, Lisa Orin, who keeps interfering, either by chance or – as Drake quickly comes to suspect – by design.

As in most of these early episodes, then, Drake is paired with a woman.  In the previous episode, Gina Scarlotti turned out to be involved in the case despite being introduced in such a way as to avoid initially raising the audience’s suspicions; in the present episode, by contrast, Lisa Orin’s introduction is precisely calculated to heighten the audience’s suspicions (and Drake’s), but she turns out to be a genuinely innocent bystander. (Owing to McGoohan’s own insistence, these pairings are not romantic – though Drake did seem to be showing a more than professional interest last time in Scarlotti.)  The women unfortunately tend to fall into the cower-in-the-corner-while-the-hero-and-villain-fight category (though this time Orin has the excuse of not being entirely sure that Drake is the hero); but both Scarlotti and Orin are at least portrayed as strong, intelligent women capable of challenging Drake’s certainty.

The title “Time to Kill” is triply ambiguous; the primary meaning is that this is a time when killing should be done (a thesis whose truth is debated between Drake and Orin), but Orin’s unexpected return to the hunting lodge in the final scene also distracts Vogeler long enough to give Drake “time to kill” him.  The third meaning would be that Drake has time to kill in the sense of time to waste, though this seems not to apply.

The episode features two now-familiar genre tropes:  an assassin assembling a gun out of apparently unrelated bits of stuff; and two fugitives unwillingly handcuffed together, forced to cooperate and then coming to respect each other.  I don’t know how familiar the gun trope would have been in 1960; the best known examples come from later sources like The Man With the Golden Gun and Day of the Jackal, and this page doesn’t cite anything earlier (though it doesn’t cite this episode either, so it’s evidently incomplete).  The handcuff trope, by contrast, has pre-1960 antecedents. 

Upon arriving in Vogeler’s nation of origin (never named, but the country is described as bordering Austria, the signs appear – despite Vogeler’s German name – to be in Hungarian, the name of Vogeler’s employers sounds like “A.V.O.” (the acronym of Hungary’s actual secret police), and references to “the revolution” of “some years” ago might indicate the Hungarian Uprising of 1956), Drake is told by a state official (Edward Hardwicke, probably best known as the 2^nd Dr. Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes):  “You understand the conditions governing your tour of our country?  You must keep to the prescribed routes, stay only at state-registered hotels, you must obey all security signs, stop at all checkpoints, carry your papers at all times, and be prepared to submit to military and police inspections.  I wish you a pleasant visit to our country.”  (He might as well invite Drake to be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered.)  Ironically, this occurs immediately after Drake has heard Lisa Orin opining that the country they are visiting is as democratic as any other.  Read one way, this could be a satire on left-wing naïveté about Communist countries; it’s surely no coincidence that Orin is depicted as hailing from neutral Sweden, rather than from a NATO member like Norway or Denmark or Iceland. Read another way – through the lens of The Prisoner’s insistence on the essential identity of oppression in both East and West – it could be taken instead, against the grain of Orin’s intention, as inviting reflection on the ways in which similar if subtler authoritarianism already pervades western societies.  (And the portrayal of the Hungarian intelligence service as operating on its own, ignoring its government’s current policy of détente with the west, naturally suggests the question whether western intelligence services ever do likewise – a potential nod in the direction of The Prisoner.)

This episode continues the previous episode’s theme of Drake’s annoyance with his superiors – first at the trivial level, as Drake makes fun of their cloak-and-dagger business with passwords (whereupon his agency contact looks at him blankly, without a scintilla of humour), and then more seriously, as Drake refuses to assassinate Vogeler, insisting on trying to bring him in alive.  When told that it “amounts to the same thing” since Vogeler will doubtless be executed after capture, Drake replies:  “That’s not my business.”  Drake thus demonstrates enough moral independence to resist the agency’s demand that he act as their assassin, but evidently not quite enough to admit to himself that one can hardly disclaim all responsibility for a death if one turns a prisoner over to those one knows will kill him.  (Drake’s moral discomfort with his job may already be indicated during the opening credits, by the less than enthusiastic way that he refers to the kind of “messy job” that gets assigned to “someone like me.”)

The ethics of Drake’s profession are further explored in the clash between Drake and Orin.  They exchange credos: speaking of her pupils, Orin says, “I teach them that men are good, that violence is wicked; and I also teach them not to distrust their fellows” – to which Drake responds, “There are some men who thrive on hate, Miss Orin; they make a profession out of war.  They aren’t many, but they’re dangerous, and they have to be stopped.”  Yet doesn’t Drake too “make a profession out of war”?  His reasons for killing Vogeler are the same as Vogeler’s reasons for killing Barkoff – preemptive defense.  (Barkoff’s research presumably has military applications.)  Don’t Drake and Vogeler both fall, at least broadly, into the “someone like me” category? 

No clear winner emerges from the ethical debate.  On the one hand, Orin’s pacifist stance is apparently “disproven” by the eventual necessity of killing Vogeler (though ironically, Orin’s own intervention is what makes impossible Drake’s original plan of capturing Vogeler instead); and her idealistic assessment of the Hungarian government is clearly intended to be undercut by the sight of border guards in the background searching Drake’s car while she talks blithely about international understanding.  But on the other hand, the guards were quite right to be suspicious of Drake’s car and should in fact have searched it still more carefully; Orin’s opposition to assassination parallels Drake’s own qualms; and Drake’s attitude of automatic distrust – a paranoia later to be counseled by the “extra” lyrics of “Secret Agent Man” (advising distrust of women in particular), and subsequently reinforced by the endless deceptions and betrayals in The Prisoner – is apparently “disproven” by Orin’s turning out to be just who she says she is.  Thus neither hawks nor doves receive unambiguous confirmation in this Cold War tale.

The fact that Orin is a woman no doubt contributes to Drake’s misperception of her intentions.  As I’ve noted elsewhere:

[I]n a patriarchal culture, women are constructed as enigmatic and deceptive, while men are plain-dealing, reliable comrades for other men .... In a culture where men subordinate and objectify women, it’s no surprise that men have trouble perceiving women’s subjectivity ....

But in addition, Drake’s own profession, with its associated habits of mistrust, surely makes it harder for him to trust anybody.  And of course, given that profession, those habits are vital to his survival; yet they are also portrayed as deforming his capacity for ordinary human interaction.  “I said that I was a schoolteacher, but I’m not. What exactly are you, Miss Orin?”

Alongside the ambiguity as to whether Drake should kill Vogeler is the ambiguity as to whether he does kill him.  Vogeler accidentally shoots himself by striking the trigger as both men are wrestling for the gun; Orin tells Drake that Vogeler’s responsibility is Vogeler’s rather than Drake’s, but that surely stretches the truth.

The ambiguity as to Drake’s own identity persists as well.  When asked “Where do you come from – the States?” Drake replies with a grunt that I think is supposed to be “Ireland,” thus apparently contradicting the implication in the previous episode that he hails from New England.  Of course he is undercover when he so grunts, so it may not be intended as accurate.

Only two episodes in, and we’re already in a maze of mirrors ....

Be seeing you!

I’ve Been Here Before (View From the Villa)

location:  Secret Agent AKA Danger Man: The Complete Collection, disc 1

airdate:  11 September 1960

NATO opening:  no

NATO openings so far:  0

NATO-less openings so far:  1

Vacation spoiled: yes

Vacations spoiled so far: 1

[This is my blog about Danger Man / The Prisoner.  If you want my blog about

The Avengers, click here.

As always:  SPOILERS BELOW.]

You’re a secret agent man

who’s after the secret plan

how do you act so they don’t know you’re a spy?

(Oh sorry, wrong theme song.)

The camera pans over attractive flowers and Italianate bric-a-brac while we hear an irregular rhythm in the background – which turns out to be the bad guys beating information out of a captive.  They overdo it, he dies, and an unseen witness gasps and jumps out the window.

The first season of Danger Man – and very nearly the only season, being separated from the second season by over a year – was once so little remembered that A&E’s earlier “complete” dvd sets omitted it entirely; and when it was first included on a later set it was advertised, falsely, as never having been aired in North America.  In fact it not only aired in America (under the title of Danger Man, the only season not to be called Secret Agent here) but was made specifically with the lucrative American market in mind (which is why it was recorded expensively on film rather than cheaply on videotape – which in turn explains why all of its early episodes survive, escaping the mass-erasure fate that devastated the early years of videotaped shows like Doctor Who and The Avengers). 

The focus on the American market likewise explains, perhaps, why John Drake was originally portrayed as an American; in this first episode, when Drake discovers evidence that the murder victim had been having an extramarital affair, another character explains “This is Rome, Mr. Drake, not New England” (and receives the reply “Well, it happens in New England too, you know”), thus apparently establishing New England as Drake’s place of origin.  (At the same time the familiar trope of naïve/innocent American vs. sophisticated/corrupt European is raised and immediately dismissed.)  McGoohan’s accent was somewhat indeterminate – his own background being simultaneously American, Irish, and English – and he could turn his accent a few notches in the direction of any of the three, always managing to sound almost-but-not-quite-right in each of them.

In later seasons he is either English or Irish, and is working for a fictional British intelligence service called M9, a kind of fusion of MI5 and MI6.  In this first season it’s not entirely clear for whom Drake works.  According to the opening narration:

Every government has its secret service branch:  America, its CIA; France, Deuxième Bureau; England, MI5.  A messy job? Well that’s when they usually call on me, or someone like me. Oh yes: my name is Drake – John Drake.

(Actually it’s MI6, not MI5, that is the equivalent of the CIA and Deuxième Bureau; but at the time the show was made, the existence of MI6 was not publicly acknowledged – and wouldn’t be for another three decades, despite being by that time an open secret.)  This might mean that Drake works for one of these agencies but is being coy about which (though not Deuxième Bureau, surely), or it might mean (more probably) that he is a freelance contractor who works on occasion for each of them.  But some versions of the narration insert the sentence “NATO also has its own” after the list of agencies, setting it apart from the rest in a way that makes it sound as though it’s specifically NATO’s agency that Drake works for.  And the gold whose theft Drake is asked to investigate in this episode is said to have been intended for Italy’s contribution to NATO, so it would make particular sense for Drake to be called in if he is indeed a NATO agent.  The whole ambiguity is nicely captured by the imagery accompanying the narration: a geographically impossible shot of a London building (Castrol/Marathon House) in the foreground (look closely – click the pic to enlarge it – and you’ll see a London bus stop sign as well) and Washington D.C.’s U.S. Capitol building in the background.  It looks the way McGoohan’s accent sounds.  Whose side are you on? – That would be telling.

The title Danger Man is ambiguous; does it mean a man who faces danger or a man who is dangerous?  The (later) theme song emphasises the former meaning, but seeing McGoohan stalking around in his odd angular manner irresistibly suggests the latter.  The title of this episode, “View from the Villa” (penned by Danger Man showrunner Ralph Smart and future Avengers writer Brian Clemens), is ambiguous too: at first it seems to mean the view that the aforementioned unseen witness had of the murder, but it later turns out to mean the particular vantage point from which a certain painting was made, enabling Drake to identify a certain location.

And what a location!  For the painting of a village that’s the crucial clue in the story turns out actually to be of the Village, as in this episode it’s Portmeirion, the Welsh seaside resort and future filming site of The Prisoner, that’s doubling as the Italian village to which Drake is led by the painting.  Indeed it was during the filming of this episode that McGoohan first got to know Portmeirion, thus laying the ground for his later decision to set his magnum opus there. For a blog devoted to the project of reading Danger Man through the lens of The Prisoner, the fact that it begins in Portmeirion is serendipitous.  The Villa(ge) is indeed everywhere!

(One especially inaccurate online summary, confusing diegetic and extradiegetic locations, tells us that “Agent Drake is sent to the small seaside resort of Portmeirion in North Wales to investigate the murder and to try and recover the money.”  In any case, he’s not “sent” anywhere.)

In another parallel, “View from the Villa” begins with McGoohan having to interrupt his vacation to investigate the case; in the opening sequence of The Prisoner, McGoohan’s character, having just resigned, is packing tropical vacation brochures into his suitcase when he is abducted.  (The theme of official duties interfering with Drake’s holiday plans will continue throughout Danger Man.)  And I suppose Drake’s initial reliance on an apparently helpful source of information who is actually trying to mislead him is another Prisoner parallel, albeit a tenuous one.

There’s not much explicit socio-political commentary in the episode, though, apart from some acid comments about bankers at the start.  The episode is set in Italy, which at the time was experiencing an economic upswing, and had joined the common market three years earlier, so the episode’s embezzlement plot could be seen as a commentary on the corruption that accompanies boom times; but the episode’s center of gravity is Drake’s interaction with two women (the witness’s dressmaker, and the murder victim’s wife), and his search for a third (the missing witness).  (Although this blog is not for the spoiler-averse, I’ll leave for the viewer the discovery of how these three women are connected, since nothing I have to say hangs on it.) 

We do see a bit of possible hypocrisy on Drake’s part:  he expresses his resentment at being called in to solve a mere murder case; yet when told there’s something more important than murder at stake, he turns moralistic, demanding to know how anything could be more important than murder.  This establishes Drake as a somewhat prickly character to get along with.

Above all, McGoohan effortlessly dominates the screen with his elusive combination of smoothness and awkwardness, like a graceful commanding spirit attempting to operate an unfamiliar body, coming across as a blend of James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, and Lt. Columbo – and making the episode a delight to watch.

Be seeing you!