The use of McGoohan's name on this is somewhat misleading. He is hardly in it! He could only have spent a day or so recording his fragments. He looks well however. He wears a powdered wig but otherwise seems in fine fettle and it is always a pleasure to see him. One can only guess that Leacock persuaded him to take part to help sell his diligent opus on the Salem story (used by Arthur Miller in The Crucible). Leacock was the director in McGoohan's early Cannes Festival offering of 1957: High Tide At Noon.
The film itself is a meticulous account. Vanessa Redgrave deteriorates from vivacity to incapacity during the four or five year duration of the story. A lot of the story is told by Redgrave narrative overlain on visual scenes.
McGoohan plays the role of the British magistrate sent to New England to apply the defining rule of law, after the colonists had taken matters into their own hands in their handling of the Salem 'madness'. Regrave's two sisters had been executed and she herself imprisoned for several years in a shed, destroying her health. The British 'Supreme Court' found in favour of the plaintiff!
However my McGoohan mania should not blind you to the fact that this is an intense docudrama which abandons the populism of Miller's emotional play, full of sexual tension. Instead Leacock lays out the mundane mendacity that created the events of the late seventeenth century. The director must have been around seventy, when he was working on this project so you feel that he must have had a sincere interest in the Salem story to devote such painstaking effort to tell the full story.
The film itself is a meticulous account. Vanessa Redgrave deteriorates from vivacity to incapacity during the four or five year duration of the story. A lot of the story is told by Redgrave narrative overlain on visual scenes.
McGoohan plays the role of the British magistrate sent to New England to apply the defining rule of law, after the colonists had taken matters into their own hands in their handling of the Salem 'madness'. Regrave's two sisters had been executed and she herself imprisoned for several years in a shed, destroying her health. The British 'Supreme Court' found in favour of the plaintiff!
However my McGoohan mania should not blind you to the fact that this is an intense docudrama which abandons the populism of Miller's emotional play, full of sexual tension. Instead Leacock lays out the mundane mendacity that created the events of the late seventeenth century. The director must have been around seventy, when he was working on this project so you feel that he must have had a sincere interest in the Salem story to devote such painstaking effort to tell the full story.