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The Prisoner plays out less like an actual film and more like a televised stage performance – mainly interiors, two great actors doing a two-hander, and an overall lack of specifics that plays better on stage than in a movie camera. When and where exactly does this story take place? What’s the wider theme/point at play here? There’s so much left up to the viewer that practically any reading is accurate given the nebulous nature of the material.
This nebulous nature opens the material up to a wide variety of interpretations, and a glimpse of its reception at the time proves this point. The Venice Film Festival rejected it as anti-communist, Ireland banned it for being pro-communist, Italy rejected it for being anti-Catholic, and all of that seems like hysterical pearl-clutching. Onstage this kind of mystique can work wonderfully, but the camera lens requires more solid architecture to build the mystique from. There are no character names, there’s no country named, and there’s no definitive timeline other than post-World War II.
The Prisoner feels like a sketch given life by Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins. They play two men that were ostensibly on the same side until the current political regime took over. Now Hawkins is an interrogator for the political machinery while Guinness is a religious man who uses the pulpit to potentially disseminate irreverent messages about the regime. Guinness is full ripening of his talents here transitioning from comedy to serious drama here and plumbing the depths of the role. He’s especially affecting in the final third where the narrative tilts into melodrama, but Guinness is self-possessed and broken in a way that feels too real for the strained credibility of the wider work.
That final stretch is a dozy as The Prisoner all but collapses in on itself straining for wider significance that it cannot reach. It feels too frightened to go as dark and real as contemporaneous works, instead settling for a semi-gloss treatment that cannot sustain the threat of torture or psychological warfare hinted at or displayed. The film is a tete-a-tete of words upon words, ideals against ideals, and its two actors deliver the goods consistently whenever, or in spite of, the rest of the film functioning as merely competent.
