davefrieze

About 30 years ago, Boston's only classical music radio station used to offer a program (after its Saturday live broadcast of the Boston Symphony) that played lots of recorded British comedy, including excerpts from "Beyond the Fringe." It was from listening to that show every week that I got to learn by heart many of the routines from this legendary stage production that started the careers of Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. This DVD now provides an opportunity to see the quartet in action, and to realize just how brilliant they were, individually and as a team.

The great routines are still great. Peter Cook was a lost genius (lost, ultimately, to drink and dissipation), and his long monologue as the miner who didn't become a judge because he didn't have the Latin is a masterpiece - only in part because his deadpan stare at the audience remains unbroken even while he's speaking the most amazing nonsense. Dudley Moore, it turns out, was also something of a lost genius (lost, in his case, to Hollywood) - his musical interludes are extraordinarily accurate parodies of various classical music styles, including an eerie impersonation of Sir Peter Pears and a set of Beethovenian variations on "The Colonel Bogey March" that gets wildly out of hand.

Another masterpiece is Alan Bennett's vaporous, meandering sermon, which includes a pointless retelling of the time he and a friend went climbing to the top of a mountain, at which point "my friend very suddenly and very violently vomited. I sometimes think life's a lot like that." Jonathan Miller is the least proficient actor of the group - he mugs and gesticulates and mutters a little too much, and it's probably for the best that he gave up performing in favor of medicine and opera direction.

The video has a few technical faults, particularly in its sound, but the camera-work is good. For anyone even remotely interested in British comedy (and in seeing where Monty Python came from), this is a must.

No, this is not the greatest movie ever made, but it has many fun moments, and the performers are as entertainingly awful as only very good actors pretending to be bad can be. (Did that make sense?) My only quibble is that the Professor and his wife (played by Blamire and Masterson) are presented as just as goofy as all of the other characters, but at times they're required to be the straight man (and woman), which doesn't quite work. Many of the actors - Larry Blamire, Brian Howe, Robert Deveau - are former Boston area performers. About 20 years ago, Blamire wrote a very funny play called "Bride of the Mutant's Tomb," which told the story of an Ed Wood-like director in the 1950's trying to make a science fiction film. "Lost Skeleton of Cadavra" could have been what he ended up with. If I recall, Brian Howe played the cameraman in that production, and the monster costume was extremely similar to the Mutant in "Skeleton."

The Alastair Sim and George C. Scott films are easily the best live-action versions of the Dickens classic, but this one has a special place in my heart, partly because I was seven when it was first broadcast and therefore pretty susceptible (I remember crying at "The Lord's Bright Blessings" at the end), and partly because as an adult I can appreciate the first-rate songs by Broadway giants Jule Styne and Bob Merrill (they also wrote "Funny Girl"). The animation is klutzy, yes, although it does have personality (the backgrounds tend to be deliberately abstract or sketchy). The voices are terrific. But the songs are really wonderful, and one of the most beautiful - "Winter Was Warm" - deserves to be resurrected in cabaret acts - it's too good for a children's movie.

This is a really first-rate film, much more convincing than the fairly crude WWII propaganda films the US studios were turning out around the same time. The good guys and the bad guys are just as clearly delineated, but in some ways - perhaps the consistent understatement of emotions and the sometimes over-the-top stiff upper lips displayed by the characters - the stakes, and the dangers, seem clearer. There are no John Waynes or Errol Flynns on this ship.

The acting is extremely good, although Noel Coward seems a little stiff and uncomfortable in his leading role. John Mills and Bernard Miles are outstanding, and Celia Johnson (in her first film role) is simply extraordinary. The final scene, where Coward as the captain of the lost ship shakes hands with the survivors, is unexpectedly moving.

Hidden from me, anyhow - I'd never heard of it until browsing through my local library's video collection. Imagine an Ealing comedy as directed by Frank Capra. All of the acting is first-rate (and Vivien Leigh, pre-"Gone with the Wind", was about as beautiful as any woman could be), and the sets are unusually lavish for what must have been a medium-budget film in its time. The characters are strong yet sufficiently complex to lift the story above the simplistic comic melodrama it might have been - I can't imagine many American films of the time (or of this time) that would allow the "villain" of the piece enough courage to face down and walk through a mob that has just publicly humiliated him and is ready to attack him. The comedy is wonderfully handled, especially during the scene in which a pack of dogs runs rampant through the villain's stately home, and during the climactic courtroom scene. (The film's funniest line makes sense only in the context of the film: Ursula Jeans' anguished "Harold, he called me a woman!") "Storm in a Teacup" is a genuine delight.

Reading through the comments, I'm struck by how many of us were 12 or 13 the year "The Prisoner" hit television. That's a good age to see it for the first time, I think - not that I'd know otherwise - when you're just on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, trying to be rebellious and conformist at the same time, trying as well to make sense out of a society that, especially in 1968, seemed to be determined not to make any sense. For me, it also helped that Patrick McGoohan was one of my idols - as "Secret Agent" John Drake, he epitomized cool, more so even than Sean Connery.

Someone else compared the series to a good novel (a couple of tie-in novels were published at the time, the better one being by Thomas M. Disch, a prominent sf writer), and I think the comparison is a good one - it's got the depth, the intelligence, the imaginative depth and the sophistication that one expects from good art and almost never gets from a television series. It also has a hearty helping of what I now recognize as British whimsy, a sense of the absurd - change the tone of the direction and that huge white bubble chasing No. 6 around the Village could be right out of "Monty Python," which of course came later. McGoohan, I gather, had to leave school relatively early in his life, and the Village itself resembles the mind of a highly intelligent autodidact: a jumble of strong visual styles, a very individual sense of structural coherence.

What's most impressive about the series, in some ways, is how little it dates. Watch almost any other television show from the late sixties - the costumes, the slang, the hairstyles all swoop you back to a specific period of time and trap you there until the final credits. Apart from a couple of female hairdos, "The Prisoner" makes no concessions to its era. There's nothing to remind you of the "real world," to jerk you out of McGoohan's dream. The final two episodes in particular are beautifully written and, for a television series, almost illegally ambiguous. A good television series these days will often pose the viewer a moral dilemma, leaving you to decide for yourself. It would never make you question the very significance of what you've just spent the last thirteen weeks watching.

All things considered, it's still the best TV series ever aired.