Persuaders!, The: The Complete Series (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jan 14, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
VariousRelease Date(s)
1971-1972 (July 26, 2024)Studio(s)
ITC Entertainment (Imprint Television/Via Vision Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: A
Review
[Editor's Note: This is a Region-Free Australian Blu-ray import.]
Established by Lew Grade in 1954, the company generally known as ITC produced many of Britain’s best-known TV programs, including The Saint, Danger Man, The Prisoner, Thunderbirds (and all the other Supermarionation programs), and later Space: 1999, and distributed others internationally, including the original incarnation of The Muppets. Unlike most British-made TV shows of the era, generally shot on videotape with only exteriors and location scenes on film, and even that in 16mm, most ITC shows were lavishly made in 35mm, with production values in line with the biggest American prime time series. Grade justified the additional expense of his programs because a key part of his empire’s income was in selling ITC programs internationally, particularly to the American market.
By the end of the 1960s and early-‘70s, however, ITC was struggling finding American buyers for its TV shows, even when they featured American actors: Department S with Joel Fabiani, Shirley’s World with Shirley MacLaine, Space:1999 with Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, The Protectors with Robert Vaughn, the latter even shot in 16mm to save money.
ITC’s biggest stars were Patrick McGoohan and Roger Moore, Moore having played Leslie Charteris’s The Saint for six seasons, from 1962 to 1969. In one sense, The Persuaders! was ITC upping the ante, casting Moore as a Simon Templar-like playboy opposite Hollywood heavyweight Tony Curtis, his movie career largely stalled but still a big star. Further, unlike earlier ITC shows, The Saint included, often set in other parts of the world but rarely filmed outside Britain, The Persuaders! would be produced on location in France and Italy.
Imprint’s The Persuaders! The Complete Series is a marvelous boxed set. The shows, all filmed in 35mm and in color, look stupendous, and like their earlier release of The Prisoner it overflows with extra features. I last looked at the series via A&E’s DVD sets, okay for the time, but this is a huge, HUGE upgrade.
The series itself is another matter. Curtis + Moore (as they’re billed in the opening credits) are fun to watch, as is regular Laurence Naismith; the guest actors are great, the show looks sumptuous by early ‘70s TV standards; John Barry’s title theme is wonderful... and, yet, I just never much cared for the show, much as I wanted to love it.
In the I Spy mold, Tony Curtis and Roger Moore are playboy/crime-fighter types, glamorously traversing the European continent. I Spy actually spent more time in Asia and Mexico than in Europe, nor was it even the first show of its type to go on location (there was, for instance, the ’50s series Foreign Intrigue), but its success led to quite a few programs actually being made abroad, including the less remembered The Man Who Never Was, Madigan, Court Martial, and several episodes of It Takes a Thief.
The show’s premise is clumsy and ill-defined. In the first episode, Overture, wealthy, frivolous playboys Danny Wilde (Curtis) and Lord Brett Sinclair (Moore) are set up by a retired judge, Fulton (Laurence Naismith), and essentially blackmailed into fighting crime on his behalf. Fulton wants to right wrongs from his days on the bench, when legal technicalities resulted in international criminals being set free.
Overture is supposed to contrast their roots—Brett the titled, sophisticated Brit born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Danny the self-made American tycoon who grew up in poverty. They spend most of the first episode disliking and trying to outwit one another, but are really two sides of the same coin, both hedonistic jet-setters. Fulton suggests that by bringing criminals to justice Danny and Brett could make themselves useful to society, though Danny and Brett only briefly reflect on their heretofore wasted lives.
All this plays like the show’s creators were putting the cart before the horse. They had Curtis and Moore, knew they wanted to shoot an I Spy type show, but didn’t quite know how to get there. Overture has a let’s-get-this-over-with air to it, and in so doing, the leading players are pretty much left as big blanks. Danny and Brett are so busy being glibly clever that their snappy banter quickly becomes tiresome. Surprisingly, the show only toys with contrasting their nationalities and, in the end, they don’t really seem to have separate personalities, other than what is generated by the actors themselves. Indeed, these fast-talking wiseguys are defined more by their cars (Curtis drives a cherry red Ferrari Dino 246GT, Moore a butterscotch Aston Martin) and their wardrobe (Curtis, with his leather jackets and turtlenecks, Moore with his striped, double-breasted suits, which he chose himself) than by anything in the scripts.
The two were undeniably heavyweight talents. The pre-Bond Moore was already familiar to American audiences as the star of Maverick (during its 1960-61 season) and especially the long-running The Saint (1962-69), while Curtis had been a film star for more than 15 years before this, his first TV series. The two work well together—Curtis and Moore seem to be playing extensions of their real offscreen personalities, and are playful and suave in an early-’70s sort of way. They’re not as natural or believable as Robert Culp and Bill Cosby were on I Spy, but Moore and Curtis seem to be enjoying themselves, and a little of that rubs off on viewers.
Nevertheless, it’s all a little too lightweight for its own good. When everything is a lark there’s no suspense; neither ever seems in any real danger. Moore’s Brett Sinclair is marginally more serious when the chips are down; Curtis’s Danny Wilde regards everything as a joke. Curtis reportedly was a bit of a headache throughout filming, getting into trouble even before shooting when he was caught smuggling pot into England, high and carousing for much of the filming.
The program looks simultaneously expensive and cheap. The cast and crew shot exteriors all over Europe, but returned to the studio (Pinewood) for interiors. In contrast to shows like the original Danger Man, which carefully integrated 2nd unit location and 1st unit studio footage, The Persuaders! is comparatively sloppy. The over-lit studios sets never look like anything else, and spoil the flavor generated by the use of real, exotic locations.
The Gold Napoleon, for instance, is set in Nice, where either Danny or a young woman (Straw Dogs’s Susan George) seems to have been the target of an assassin’s bullet. The show uses some great locales, but the studio sets are not convincing, and some of the process shots (Curtis on a motorcycle, George on an airport runway) are downright awful, even by 1971 standards. The episode has some real talent behind the camera—Val Guest wrote the script which Roy Ward Baker directed—but the show evolves into a pretty ordinary tale of gold smuggling. The best thing about this episode is Curtis, who at 46, was still athletic enough to pull off some impressive stunts, shimmying up the side of a three-story building, and moving about its rafters, recalling his role in Trapeze (1956). The episode, incidentally, along with the pilot, was incorporated into a faux feature, Mission: Monte Carlo (1974).
Somewhat better is Greensleeves, which like most of the episodes this reviewer saw, awkwardly sets its story in motion. Once it gets underway, however, its teleplay (by Terence Feely) is both clever and fairly amusing. In this episode, Brett learns that a group of criminals (led by Andrew Kier) have taken over his estate. The villains hire a look-alike actor to impersonate Brett, who turns out to be Brett himself. Moore has fun playing a man impersonating himself, as does Curtis who pretends to be a Hungarian butler. Longtime character player George Woodbridge also turns up playing (what else?) an innkeeper in this fun show.
Imprint’s The Persuaders! The Complete Series is a peerless boxed set. The box is sturdy and attractively design, everything contained in a space about the size of a single volume of the old A&E DVDs. The video transfers are top-drawer—sharp as a tac, colors that “pop,” great contrast, inky blacks, no signs of damage, etc. ITC shows heavily employed traveling mattes and other optical effects, but even these look better than they had in the days of 16mm TV prints and standard-def video. The LPCM mono (2.0 mono) is also excellent, and supported by optional English subtitles.
The set consists of three Blu-ray cases. The first two contain the entire run of the series, episodes 1-15 in the first case on four discs, episodes 16-24 in the second case on three discs. The third case consists of eight ersatz feature films drawn from the series on five discs. These are presented in 1.78:1 widescreen (and probably exhibited alternately in 1.66:1 and 1.85:1 widescreen when in theaters, depending on the region where shown). Their titles are: The Persuaders!, Mission: Monte Carlo, London Conspiracy, Sporting Chance, The Switch, The Last Appointment, Death Becomes Me, and The Masqueraders.
Extras for these feature-length recuts include Cinematic Persuasion: Remaking the Feature Films, a featurette with restorer Jonathan Wood; restored trailers, including two Italian release trailers; film poster galleries, and a bonus disc with the original 1970s 4:3 versions of four of the titles, presented in standard-definition.
Other extras are a mix of new and archival material. They include 11 audio commentary tracks featuring Moore, Curtis, producer Robert S. Baker, production executive Johnny Goodman, production manager Malcolm Christopher, 1st assistant director Ken Baker, actress Annette Andre, series restorer Wood, Roger Moore biographer Gareth Owens, television historian Henry Holland, and ITC historian Jaz Wiseman, with excerpts from director Roy Ward Baker, and filmmakers Samuel and George Clemens. The Saint: The Ex-King of Diamonds offers an episode of that series (which helped inspire The Persuaders!), also in HD and featuring two commentary tracks featuring Moore, Robert S. Baker, and Goodman. The Morning After: Remastering The Persuaders! is a self-explanatory featurette, while The Deadly includes an interview with guest star Derren Nesbitt.
Also included are isolated music and effects tracks for each episode; and “vault” material featuring older interviews with Moore, Curtis, and others; Avroskoop, a Dutch television program filmed on the set of the series; opening titles test footage; raw production footage, promotional spots, sponsorship tags, commercial break bumpers, French credit sequences, the 1972 Sun TV Awards, photo galleries for each episode and memorabilia galleries, and more.
Finally, there’s a beautifully designed 120-page full-color booklet featuring an exhaustively thorough history of the program by Andrew Pixley, an episode guide, and original press material.
All TV shows on Blu-ray should have it this good. For fans of The Persuaders!, this is a must-have.
- Stuart Galbraith IV