Before he was a number, when he was a free man, that famous Prisoner of Portmeirion known only as Number Six was an international man of mystery - a man who led a life of danger, to everyone he met remaining a stranger. The odds were always that he wouldn't live to see tomorrow.
Then he was given a number, and they took away his name.
But back then, in his salad days of spooking and spying as the number one of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's secret service, his name was Drake. John Drake.
Emerging from a government building in Washington DC (in reality a composite shot, adding the Capitol Building of Washington behind the Castrol Building of Marylebone Road, London) to the strains of Edwin Astley's original Danger Man theme (later, in the subsequent 50-minute episode seasons, to be replaced by Astley's more iconic score entitled 'High Wire' - only to be replaced in turn for the episodes' American airings as Secret Agent by the PF Sloan-penned and Johnny Rivers-crooned slice of sonic Sixties Spymania 'Secret Agent Man'), Patrick McGoohan's Drake gives the series' mission statement in a mid-Atlantic voiceover:
"Every government has its secret service branch. America: CIA. France: Deuxieme Bureau. England: MI5. NATO also has its own. A messy job? Well, that's when they usually call on me - or someone like me. Oh yes - my name is Drake. John Drake."
Created for Lord Lew Grade's Incorporated Television Company (ITC) by writer and producer Ralph Smart, who had overseen ITC's William Tell and Invisible Man series in 1958-59, Danger Man chronicled the adventures of the titular man of action played by Anglo-Irish-American actor (a true Transatlantic talent!) McGoohan - a lone wolf troubleshooter whose employers sent jet-setting around the globe to various locales to become entangled in the shadowy goings-on behind the sunny exotic climes.
Co-written by Smart and future Avengers auteur (as well as the eminence grise behind '70s-tastic cop caper The Professionals [1977-83] and tres '90s techno-espionage mess Bugs [1995-99], and the author of everything from the sublime heights of Robert Fuest's 1970 And Soon the Darkness to the perhaps not so great nadir of Russell Mulcahy's 1991 Highlander II: The Quickening) Brian Clemens, the opening assignment sees the indefatigable Drake dispatched to Rome to investigate the murder of imbezzling American banker Frank Delroy (Philip Latham, recognisable to connoisseurs of cultdom as the immortality-seeking Lord President Borusa from Doctor Who's 'The Five Doctors' [Peter Moffatt, 1983] and/or the Counts blood-seeking servant Klove in Terence Fisher's 1965 Dracula: Prince of Darkness - before Klove regenerated into the even Whoier form of Patrick Troughton for 1970's Scars of Dracula - but a mainstay of British TV and quota quickie second features such as Merton Park's Edgar Wallace Mysteries for decades). We open on a pre-credits sequence of Delroy being tortured with a savage beating - possibly for causing offence with the terrible Stateside accent half-heartedly being affected by Latham - by the thuggish Mego (burly Tyneside actor Colin Douglas, who had a similarly lengthy career as Latham, including being a two-time Who alumnus [1968's 'The Enemy of the World' and 1977's 'Horror of Fang Rock'] and a Hammer appearance in Peter Graham Scott's 1962 Eastmancolour version of Russell Thorndike's 'Doctor Syn' stories Captain Clegg [aka Night Creatures] - coincidentally a subject matter to be visited a year later by McGoohan himself in the eponymous role of James Neilson's Dr Syn, Alias the Scarecrow). Mego is the henchman of the villainous Tony Mayne (played by Australian actor John Lee, Alydon of the Aryan Thals in the premiere of the pestilent pepperpots 'The Daleks' [1963-64] and Len Mangel of Erinsborough's Neighbours [1994]), who is seeking the $5, 000, 000 dollars worth of gold bullion that Delroy has funneled from the financial funds for his own personal use.
Mego's rather overenthusiastic beating (i can relate) leads to Delroy's demise without confessing the loot's location, and to add to Mayne's woes and frustration (i can... never mind) the terrible twosome hear the sound of Delroy's aghast mistress - who has witnessed the murder from the apartment's bedroom - fleeing via the fire escape to the Via below. Drake enters into this murder scene mise-en-scene accompanied by his own gruff noirish voiceover, setting the scene like the Sam Spade of Sixties Spymania by describing bank manager Mr Finch (played by the wonderfully named Canadian actor Court Benson) as "in no way distressed by the death of his president - only unbalanced accounts would distress Mr Finch. The man had ink in his veins", all delivered in McGoohan's distinctive clipped vocal style.
Drake's detective work leads him across Rome - represented in the trademark 1960s ITC adventure serial style (viz. The Champions [1968-69], The Saint [1962-69], Man in a Suitcase [1967-68] et al) by mixing location footage with distinctly Borehamwood-bound studio interiors - to couturiere Gina Scarlotti (Barbara Shelley, whose status as a Hammer Horror heroine for such future films as Terence Fisher's The Gorgon [1964] and Dracula: Prince of Darkness [1965], as well as Roy Ward Baker's 1967 big screen version of Nigel Kneale's seminal slice of SF Quatermass and the Pit had already been staked out - so to speak - by her early roles in Alfred Shaughnessy's 1957 feline frightfest Cat Girl [in which co-starred John Lee], Henry Cass' 1958 Blood of the Vampire and Wolf Rilla's 1960 John Wyndham adaptation Village of the Damned). Having discovered that the absent witness wore the fashions of Signora Scarlotti's boutique, he pumps the pretty proprietor for information on the late Delroy's missing mistress but receives only the vaguest of descriptions ("blonde... rather pretty, with a good figure" and "I don't think she was very nice") and an address that takes him to the construction site of a still-unfinished edifice. Further stymied by a seemingly insoluble lack of leads (the lady in question "always pain in cash, never by cheque, no matter how large the amount" and "never had her orders delivered - always picked up by messenger") Drake finds himself even more perplexed when a waiter from Delroy's regular ristorante recalls the fugitive bit on the side very differently ("she is dark, she is a true Roman" and "so kind"), but obtains a clue from the establishment's sketch artist - a drawing by our gone girl signed with a 'G' which matches that on a painting hanging in the apartment crime scene.
Tracing the real life locale of this watercolour scenic landscape of belvederes and campaniles leads Drake on a drive to a small village (or should that be spelled with a capital 'V'?) played by the actual In Real Life location of Portmeirion - the Italianate North Wales folly built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis that would become world famous for its use as the main location of McGoohan's post- Danger Man cult classic The Prisoner (1967-68). There is a strange sense of dislocation, of a strange retroactive deja vu, in the shots of McGoohan's Drake parking his vehicle to stare up at the iconic belltower with a quizzical expression - as if he is recognising his own future prison - like there's a continuity error in reality itself. Here in this strange place Drake finds a villa, the vista from which matches the painting exactly, and correctly deduces that this is the holiday home of sometime artist, daytime dressmaker and ex-sexy bit of stuff on the side Gina Scarlotti. Admitting to her affair with - and intention to someday marry - the late Delroy, Gina confesses her deceit due to her fear of being identified by Mayne as the sole witness of her lover's murder but denies any knowledge of the missing millions before pointing out a wooden crate that she was told to be full of books: the contents of which turn out to be more suited to a bank vault than a bookshelf. The treasure trove thus tracked down, it only remains for Drake to take on the trio of Mego, Mayne and the merry widow of Delroy who has been treacherously teamed up with Tony all along. One of the series' patented action scenes - an unarmed fist-fight, at McGoohan's own request minutely planned out and choreographed to the minutest detail to be as realistic as possible - ends with Gina putting a bullet in the murderer and wounding him. "Don't worry, he's going to live," Drake tells her as he takes the smoking gun of vengeance from her trembling hand and picks up the phone to call in the cavalry, "and from now on, so are you."
John Drake would go on to face another villainous Mayne three episodes later in 'The Blue Veil' in the awesome form of Ferdy Mayne (Count von Krolock in Roman Polanski's wonderful 1967 Dance of the Vampires [aka: The Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck] as the Moukta - rather perplexingly credited as 'The Mayne' in that episode's entry on Danger Man website danger-man.co.uk - but his career would of course go on and on, graduating from the original 25-minute episode format to the higher budgeted 50-minute version of the show known best Stateside by its alternate moniker (how apt for a spy) of Secret Agent, replete with iconic theme tune. Between that and the full-colour cult immortality of The Prisoner, there was the strange hybrid halfway house of a two-part John Drake story filmed in full colour and set in Japan - which co-starred Christopher Benjamin (Henry Gordon Jago of Doctor Who renown) as the character of Potter, who would re-appear in the Prisoner episode 'The Girl Who Was Death'. This two-part missing link betwixt Danger Man and The Prisoner would later be edited into a rarely seen movie Koroshi (Michael Truman and Peter Yates, 1968), an Eastern piece of ephemeral espionage.
A Secret Asian Man.
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