The Screengrab : patrick mcgoohan

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Jan. 10-16, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Hey, Pansy Nation. Why don’t you get your fat faces out of your computer screens for five minutes and go get some fresh air? Maybe do a push-up or something. Y’know, when they asked me to host the Highlight Reel this week, I figured I was gonna be showing clips of The Outlaw Josey Wales and Any Which Way You Can. I didn’t realize the Screengrab was nothing but a bunch of limp-wristed globbers. Well, I never had a glob. Never saw the need for it. What am I gonna do, sit around writing about Strangers in a Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-of-Water Stories (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six)? Hell no, I’ve got boars to shoot.

I’ve never been to Sundance, either. I always figured it was just an excuse for Redford and his pinko friends to hit the slopes before going back to the lodge for tea and fairycakes. But I guess if you care, you can read about Five Must-See Documentaries, Ten Must-See Narrative Features (Parts One and Two) and Five Movies to Skip. Hell, you can even read about Slamdance if you want.

Here’s some more crap I don’t care about:

Screengrab 2009 Preview: Paul Clark’s Picks and Scott Von Doviak’s Picks

Keyword Theater: The Winter Edition

Screengrab Live Blogs the Golden Globes

Nine-Point Plans

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's Undeserved Oscar Buzz

Patrick McGoohan, 1928 – 2009

Netflix Killed the Video Store…Or Did It?

Why Must Steve Martin Suck?

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.

Take Five: Psychics

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Death Defying Acts opens in limited release this weekend, and so far, it hasn't generated much advance buzz. It's hard to figure out why: It comes on the heels of other successful movies involving magicians, including The Prestige and The Illusionist; it's a romance-driven period piece (which should attract women), but it features a murder mystery, psychics, and famed escape artist Harry Houdini (for the fellas); it's got an all-star cast led by perennial heartthrobs Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and it's directed by none other than girl-geek icon Gillian Anderson. Maybe people are confused by the premise: in Death Defying Acts features Zeta-Jones as a spiritualist out to run a con on the master magician. We haven't seen it yet, so we're not sure if Zeta-Jones' powers are portrayed as being authentic, but in real life, Houdini was a relentless skeptic who didn't believe in any aspect of the paranormal, and who, in fact, went out of his way to disprove all claims of the supernatural as buncombe. Regardless, Hollywood has always been a sucker for a good psychic yarn, which probably explains why goofy New Age religions tend to take root in southern California before hitting the rest of the country. For today's Take Five, we bring you a handful of fine films about psychics -- and not a single one starring Shirley MacLaine.

THE SHINING (1980)

Nobody does psychic powers like Stephen King, and nobody realizes those psychic powers on screen better than Stanley Kubrick does in this horror classic. One of the most effective ideas Kubrick had was to de-emphasize Danny's psychic abilities, to tone down the paranormal aspects of the story (such as the hedge topiary coming to life) in order to play up the much more compelling dramatic element of a family in isolation slowly falling apart. Not that the terrifying paranormal elements aren't there: few moments in contemporary horror are creepier than seeing Danny go into a drooling fit, or the bizarre images he sees in the abandoned rooms of the Outlook Hotel -- but by keeping them ambiguous, by allowing the suggestion that none of it is real, that it's all just possibly the byproduct of an epileptic vision or a mind damaged by loneliness and alcohol -- the whole thing is made more compelling and upsetting than if the paranormal elements were made explicit.

SCANNERS (1981)

There's nothing subtle or ambiguous, on the other hand, about David Cronenberg's early sci-fi terror masterpiece. Before his transition to an artist of the decay and dysfunction of the body in modern classics like The Fly, Cronenberg's obsession was the abuse and alteration of the mind -- and as he showed in movies like Altered States, The Brood and Videodrome, an unhinged mind could do a vast amount of damage. Nowhere is this given a sharper point than in his cult classic Scanners, which works pretty much like HIghlander except with exploding heads instead of sword decapitations. As shadowy corporations struggle to control the massive psionic powers of a handful of people, we witness the battle firsthand through the activities of a highly game cast which includes mopey Stephen Lack, sinister Michael Ironside, and hammy Patrick McGoohan. Scanners also features one of our favorite taglines ever: "There are four billion people on Earth. 237 are scanners. And they are winning." Choice!

THE FURY (1978)

After having wet his beak in the unhinged-psychic game with a now-legendary film adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie (see, there's king again), Brian De Palma warmed to the subject and cranked out a modest but highly energetic (and entertaining) teen-psychics-in-trouble picture called The Fury. Featuring Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens as the two fresh-faced kids who have to worry about blowing up a city block instead of needing to pick up some Clearasil, the plot revolves around their being sent to a government research lab where their overseers must walk a thin line between making sure their prize specimens don't get away and make them happy enough that they don't turn their considerable powers on their masters. Playing almost like a trial run of some of David Cronenberg's laer stuff, The Fury is bounding with energy (and not just of the psychic variety), and its B-movie plot is highly abetted by the top-notch cast, including a wildly overaheated Kirk Douglas as Stevens' father and a gravely understated John Cassavetes as one of the government flunkies.

AKIRA (1988)

As any teenager -- including the ones on this list -- can tell you, being young is no picnic. Your body starts to change, girls don't like you and you can't figure out why, you start feeling sick and alienated for no reason, and before you know it, you're hanging out with a bunch of nogoodniks in a biker gang. But if you start to develop horrific psychic powers, ones that can kill your friends, turn you into a grotesque monster, and even level the entire city of Toyko with the power of a nuclear bomb? Well, that, brother, as a very wise man once said, is when your heartaches really begin. Katsuhiro Otomo's groundbreaking animated feature, based on his own graphic novel series, featured stellar animation, top-shelf voice acting, creepy effects, a complex but not incomprehensible storyline (it turns out, to no one's real surprise, that a nefarious military intelligence project is behind poor Akira's transformation into a psionic monstrosity), and some great effects at the movie's unforgettable end all helped open up western markets to both anime and manga, transforming the world of comics and film forever.

INVINCIBLE (2001)

Anyone can make a movie about deranged psychics who threaten the lives of their loved ones. Leave it to Werner Herzog to up the ante by making a movie about a deranged psychic in the employ of the Nazi party who enlists a Jewish strongman to help him put on a carnival show about Siegfried, the legendary Aryan hero of myth. It's this kind of intensely focussed eccentricity, and reckless disregard for making sense, that seperates the men like Herzog from the boys. This was Herzog's first narrative feature after a prolonged stretch of making documentaries, and while it's not nearly in the same league as movies like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, it's still got his knack for breathtaking imagery and his gift for illustrating the mad inner lives of obsessives in spades. The psychic in question in Invincible is Erik Jan Hanussen, the doomed faux-Dane who, for a while, operated as Hitler's personal clairvoyant until falling out of favor with Der Fuhrer's inner circle and getting himself assassinated. His story is also told in the relatively straightforward biopic Hanussen (1988), but that movie can't compete with Tim Roth's giddy performance or Herzog's fiery direction.