From the Los Angeles Times
'60s spy-jinks in 'U.N.C.L.E.'
A pair of suave, sexy, agents heated up the Cold War and the hearts of female viewers, and now their four-season arc is captured on DVD.
By Robert Lloyd
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 25, 2007
ALTHOUGH we are now accustomed to carrying around record collections and multiplexes in our pockets, to my ancient mind there is still something pleasantly improbable about the thought that all 105 episodes of "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." have been put onto DVD and packaged in a single cardboard "attaché case" roughly the size of a complete volume of Shakespeare. (I will dare no other comparisons between the two.) That a laser beam is at the heart of the technology that has made this possible is also suitably science-fiction, and poetically appropriate, regarded with a mind that can still thrill at the words "laser beam." Laser beam! Oh!
Unto each generation heroes are born, and in the High Cold War days of my youth, the spy was king (succeeding cowboys and "army men" in the aggressive playtime imagination). With the fate of the world again being decided by invisible armies, it is no surprise we are seeing a slight return of the secret agent. "Chuck" and "Burn Notice," especially, are in the "U.N.C.L.E." tradition: They are made to convert geopolitical anxiety into plain fun.
I can't exactly say that I'm a kid again, watching these shows after many years -- the NBC series ran from September 1964 to January 1968 -- since as a kid I went entirely, unquestioningly into their reality, whereas now I can't help viewing the whole thing with amused, ironic detachment. To say the show is quaintly dated in nearly all its particulars is not to say it is no longer entertaining. Indeed, I love it as much for what makes it silly -- the visible effects of its budgetary constraints, the way that everything is labeled as exactly what it is (Private Airfield, Central Control, Explosives), its risible political incorrectness -- as for what made it actually good (cartoon energy, the wit of its lead performances). And is not "amused, ironic detachment" the very essence of the character of the modern filmic secret agent? Really, the whole world could use a lot more of that.
I find these shows effortless fun to rewatch -- although I am surprised at how poorly I can recall any specific episode, given the deep imprint of the characters and their milieu upon my imagination. The Brylcreemed suavity of Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn), the slightly ascetic cool of mop-topped Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum), the donnish dry wit of their boss, Mr. Alexander Waverly (Leo G. Carroll), and their shared repertoire of raised eyebrows and deadpan shrugs. The gray corridors of the "U.N.C.L.E." HQ, with their endless successions of sliding doors -- not a single hinge to be found in the whole of that place. The tin-can technology that 40 years ago passed for wondrous, most famously the communicator pen (originally a cigarette pack) that opens Channel D, a secret device that announces incoming calls with the gusto of a car alarm. ("Vibrate" had yet to be invented.)
I have to wonder if this could elicit a glimmer of interest from a contemporary tot, weaned on CGI effects and the three-second edit and who may carry on his own person a small device capable of worldwide communication, along with a host of other cute tricks the "U.N.C.L.E." engineers were born too early to even consider.
BIG-SCREEN INFLUENCES
EXECUTIVE producer Norman Felton reportedly had Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" in mind when he began to think about a series about spies. But James Bond is, of course, the nearer and more obvious influence; Ian Fleming was in fact briefly involved in the show's creation -- though all that he seems to have contributed, finally, is the name Napoleon Solo. More important was Fleming's perception that the Cold War could be made glamorous, could provide a productive context for sexy adventures garnished with games of chemin de fer and fast cars and martinis shaken, not stirred.
With an American and a Russian agent working together for the good of all nations, the series can conceivably be seen as a bold, idealistic repudiation of Cold War politics. (U.N.C.L.E. stands for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, and the U.N. building is often seen in the much-repeated establishing shot of New York.) The villains are not ideologues but old-school world-domination types, on the Alexandrian/Cesarean model. The heroes serve a Wilsonian vision of respectful cooperation between sovereign bodies.
And yet, arriving at a moment of great cultural change, when every sort of social assumption would be loudly challenged, "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." was a thing of the past almost in its own time -- you can feel almost the world pulling away from it. It is clueless about youth culture, parochial as regards the Third World, Neanderthal about women. (The strongest female characters are all enemy agents.) Even as Vietnam was heating up, the series inhabited a world that, owing in no small part to its being shot largely on the back lot of MGM, seemed to have more to do with the B pictures of the 1930s and '40s than any present realities.
Among "U.N.C.L.E." aficionados and alumni, the first two seasons are generally accounted best, the third is seen as a camp-inspired descent into jokiness and hokiness, and the abbreviated fourth an unsuccessful attempt to get "serious" again. (The third-season "My Friend the Gorilla Affair," which finds Napoleon Solo doing the Watusi with a female Tarzan and a gorilla, is indeed some sort of low point.) At the same time, it's possible to argue that the show was always basically preposterous and what undid it in the end was a failure to recognize that a degree of silliness was essential to its charm; Season 4 has its points, but it is overall pokey and grim. Comedy and suspense are not mutually exclusive, after all.
And if you can't have fun saving the world every week, I mean, what fun can you have?
robert.lloyd@latimes.com
SOURCE:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-uncle25nov25,1,3505735.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From the Los Angeles Times
Now it's grandmas who cry 'U.N.C.L.E.'
The '60s spy series, out Tuesday on DVD, made sex symbols out of its suave stars.
By Susan King
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 25, 2007
Though NBC's sexy spy series "The Man from U.N.C.L.E" left the airwaves nearly 40 years ago -- it was replaced by "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in" -- star Robert Vaughn still gets approached by fans about the show.
"It's amazing," says the ageless 74-year-old Vaughn, who is now a regular on AMC's "Hustle." "I often run into grandmothers now who talk about the show. I say to them, 'Interestingly enough, I was 12 when I did the show.' "
So the grannies of America will be thrilled to know that the entire series is making its DVD debut Tuesday in a set featuring 10 hours of extras about the show, which aired from 1964 through 1968.
Vaughn played super-suave agent Napoleon Solo, who was as handy with a gun as he was romancing the ladies; David McCallum, currently a regular on CBS' "NCIS," was his equally hunky partner, Russian-born Ilya Kuryakin. They worked with a secret international law enforcement agency, the United Network Command for Law Enforcement, and every week they would battle the bad guys of THRUSH. Leo G. Carroll played their boss, Alexander Waverly.
"He was the class of the show," Vaughn says of Carroll. "He had a wonderful sense of humor."
"The Man from U.N.C.L.E." was just one of the many spy shows and movies made because of the success of the James Bond films. In fact, there was a spy named Solo in Ian Fleming's novel of "Goldfinger."
"The pilot script that was given to me said 'Solo' on the cover," reflects Vaughn. "After it got the greenlight from NBC and there was some litigation -- I never know what it was about -- NBC named me Napoleon Solo and renamed the show 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'"
Vaughn, who remains close friends with McCallum, says that in the original two-hour pilot, McCallum's Kuryakin appeared briefly. "But he had such a big response from the girls, they started building up his part in the first year."
The series also didn't actually burn up the ratings when it premiered in September 1964. "If it had gone on the air in 2007, it would have been canceled," he says. "But what happened was that college students had discovered the show [that fall], and when they got back home [for Christmas] they took over the television set at home and suddenly the ratings went into the 20s, and within six months, we were in the Top 10."
"U.N.C.L.E" also attracted an eclectic mixture of guest stars, including puppeteer Shari Lewis and film icons Joan Crawford and George Sanders.
"They usually used the movie stars on two-hour shows," he says. "There were eight two-hour shows made, which were released over the world as motion pictures. After we finished the 12-day shooting schedule on the two-hour shows, they would add two or three days of shooting with someone like Senta Berga who could reveal a certain amount of cleavage for the international audiences."
The series quickly made the two actors sex symbols, but the adoration took Vaughn and McCallum by surprise. Vaughn had received a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for 1959's "The Young Philadelphians" and had done "Hamlet" on stage several times. McCallum had appeared in such classics as "A Night to Remember," "Freud" and "The Great Escape."
"We fancied ourselves to be pretty serious actors, and then to be met at airports by hundreds and in some cases thousands of girls ripping our clothes off. . . ."
susan.king@latimes.com
SOURCE:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-uncleside25nov25,1,4613084.story?ctrack=3&cset=true
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From USA TODAY:
•The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68, Time Life, unrated, $250): In a decade when even Dean Martin played a secret agent, U.N.C.L.E. was NBC's answer to James Bond, and my brother-in-law Glenn has asked me incessantly for a decade: "When is it coming out on DVD?" Well, here's Robert Vaughn, David McCallum, Leo G. Carroll and the entire run (pilot included) on 41 discs, available exclusively from Time Life via ManFromUncleDVD.com. Though it eventually turned silly, expanded or combined episodes played even in American and overseas theaters. A mere casting sample could engender history's all-time condo mixer: Joan Crawford, Joan Collins, little Kurt Russell, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Playboy Playmate of the Year Donna Michelle, Shelley Berman, Ricardo Montalban, Chad Everett, Jack Palance, Sharon Tate, Gunga Din villain Eduardo Ciannelli, Inspector Clouseau nemesis Herbert Lom, Rip Torn, Sonny and Cher, Leslie Nielsen, Vincent Price, Nancy Sinatra, Richard Kiel, Groucho Marx's announcer George Fenneman, blond sex bomb deity of my adolescence Barbara Bouchet and Victor Borge.
|