Comments on: Patrick McGoohan (1929-2009)

By: Moor Larkin

Moor Larkin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:19:16 +0000

Bit late in the day to table a factual correction, but McGoohan never played a gay priest so far as I know. In ‘Serious Charge’ he played a vicar who was *accused* of being gay, by a vituperative young ne’er-do-well from the village to which the vicar had recently been posted. The idea of the play was to show the corrupting ‘consequences’ of the laws that applied to male homosexuality in Britain at that time. It was 1955.

By: Omar Badawi

Omar Badawi — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:24:02 +0000

Oh man, they’re easily available on the web, all four of them. There are even a few episodes he directed, and produced, but who cares about that. We want to see the actor. Here are the four Columbo episodes in which he appears: S04E03 – By Dawn’s Early Light – Columbo, S05E03 – Identity Crisis – Columbo, S09E03 – Agenda For Murder (352×264), and S12E06 – Ashes to Ashes – Columbo. Ta ta for now.

By: Omar Badawi

Omar Badawi — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:06:24 +0000

I’m finally going to make the effort to track down all the Patrick McGoohan episodes of Colombo. I believe there are four of them. How about talking about that relationship? Peter Falk and McGoohan were good friends.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:27:29 +0000

AMC also has some amazing production photos from The Prisoner on their blog:

http://blogs.amctv.com/the_prisoner_-_1967_production_photos/episode-9-checkmate-mcgoohan.php

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:19:25 +0000

I can see why The Simpsons would parody it at such length. The smoke monster on Lost (amongst other things) owes a lot to "the rover" that was seen on The Prisoner. That has to be one of the most visually arresting images ever to grace the boob tube. And that opening sequence? I've watched it on youtube, and it's amazing how McGoohan was able to compress all the backstory you needed into less than two minutes of footage, dialogue, and music. I think it's the earliest example, before The Simpsons, The Sopranos, The X-Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer of just how good television can be.

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:36:10 +0000

“It all comes back to Levy â€” so let’s look at _him_ in greater depth in the next couple days. ”

In the context of The Prisoner, that sounds like I’m going to come under intense surveillance.

By: Todd Seavey

Todd Seavey — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:29:14 +0000

Fun facts about McGoohan’s _Scanners_ co-star Jennifer O’Neill: now sixty, O’Neill has been married and divorced nine times (that’s more than Las Vegas-dwelling Sheena Easton’s four!), was in the short-lived TV series _Cover-Up_ made famous by one of its stars (Jon-Erik Hexum) accidentally killing himself with a blanks-firing pistol, coincidentally accidentally shot herself in the abdomen once, and went from getting an abortion to becoming a devout pro-life Christian who wrote the following in her 2004 autobiography:

“I was told a lie from the pit of hell: that my baby was just a blob of tissue. The aftermath of abortion can be equally deadly for both mother and unborn child. A woman who has an abortion is sentenced to bear that for the rest of her life.”

Very David Cronenberg, in a way.

By: Todd Seavey

Todd Seavey — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:26:04 +0000

Incidentally, it was Prisoner fan Jacob Levy who told me of McGoohan’s passing — and Jacob who helped me out with the organizing of a “Liberty Awareness Week” back when we were at Brown, the climax of which was a screening in my dorm lounge of Prisoner episodes — of which the only viewer besides me turned out to be student Michelle Boardman, a fellow libertarian who now teaches law at George Mason — and, perhaps troublingly to some, was also the chief defender in Senate hearings from the Justice Department of Bush’s (arguably perfectly traditional) use of “signing statements” to explain which laws he’d consider held in abeyance pending their constitutional review.

Is she freedom-loving No. 6? Or authoritarian No. 2? Does 2 = 6? Six of one, half a dozen of the other? One more Mobius strip in the twisty-turny saga of order and anarchy.

And she and Levy have both blogged on the same site as presumed Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, Volokh.com, come to think of it. It all comes back to Levy — so let’s look at _him_ in greater depth in the next couple days.

By: --Brad

--Brad — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:07:11 +0000

McGoohan didn’t die. He escaped.