Patrick Macnee Movies
British actor Patrick Macnee barely had time to earn his Eton school tie when he began training for his career on a scholarship to the Webber Douglas School of Dramatic Art. While serving with the Royal Navy during World War II, Macnee made his first film appearance with a small role in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (43). He continued essaying such featured roles as Young Marley in the 1951 Christmas Carol before coming to Broadway with the Old Vic troupe in 1954. He decided to stay in Hollywood a while, appearing in several TV shows and such films as Les Girls (57). He would later describe most of his roles during this period as "villainy in a tri-corner hat." In 1960, Macnee traded his period duds for a bowler and three-piece suit when he began his long run as sophisticated secret agent John Steed on the British TV series The Avengers (incidentally, the murder that Macnee was "avenging" in the early episodes was that of a woman played by his then-wife Kate Woodville). He remained the one permanent fixture on The Avengers until its demise in 1968, appearing opposite three different jumpsuit-clad leading ladies: Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg and Linda Thorson. Macnee also showed up as a supervisor of sort in the 1977 "retro" series The New Avengers, leaving the karate and gunplay to Joanna Lumley and Gareth Hunt. In America, Patrick Macnee appeared regularly on the TV series Gavilan (82), Empire (84), and Lightning Force (91). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide- 1950
In this costume adventure set in France during the Reign of Terror, a mysterious man known only as the Scarlet Pimpernel rescues noblemen from the guillotine and leads them to safety across the English Channel. Chauvelin (Cyril Cusack) is determined to unmask the Pimpernel and bring him to justice. When evidence begins to suggest that the hero is actually foppish Sir Percey Blakeney (David Niven), Chauvelin blackmails Percey's wife, Marguerite (Margaret Leighton), into cooperating on the threat that he'll expose the criminal activities of her brother Armand (Edmund Audran). However, Marguerite doesn't much care for her husband, hardly believes he could be the heroic Pimpernel, and is startled when she finds out that he truly is the masked vigilante. The Elusive Pimpernel was originally shot in color as a musical, but the musical numbers were cut before the film was released, and the picture's American distributor chose to make only black-and-white prints (though the current home-video release is in color). ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- David Niven, Margaret Leighton, (more)
- 1950
David Phillips (Patrick Macnee) is running down the darkened streets of London's Limehouse district, pursued by two men with guns. He finds a public phone and puts a call through to Dick Barton (Don Stannard), but before he can report, a shot rings out. Barton must piece together what Phillips found out that got him killed. Phillips had been assigned to protect Professor Mitchell (Percy Walsh) and his new development, a ray capable of exploding any unstable element aboard an aircraft in flight. Mitchell has been targeted for kidnapping by Serge Volkoff (Meinhart Maur), a foreign agent from Eastern Europe, as part of a larger, much more sinister plot to destroy England and cripple Western Europe. Complicating matters further is that Mitchell's daughter (Joyce Linden) has also been kidnapped, and Barton must contend with Volkoff's crafty female companion Anna (Tamara Desni). ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
- 1950
Future Avengers star Patrick Macnee stars in the 1951 British romantic drama The Girl is Mine. Macnee and Pamela Deeming play Hugh Hurcombe and Betty Marriott, part-owners of a charter boat. Their business success, and their budding romance, is threatened by vindictive dock owner James Rutt (Lionel Murton). American businessman Pringle (Arthur Melton) offers to help the young couple. Hugh accepts the offer, only to regret it later on when Pringle himself falls in love with Betty. The Girl is Mine was produced and directed by Marjorie Deans, one of a handful of female directors in England. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1948
In this strange drama, two Englishmen dare Ferguson to spend the night in a haunted house. He accepts the challenge and settles down with a candle, a gun and a horror story about two sisters who are killed in a haunted house. He falls asleep reading. He begins dreaming about the sisters when he is suddenly awakened by what he believes is a ghost. He reflexively shoots at it then faints dead away. Considerable time passes. Ferguson and the Englishmen meet yet again. This time they come clean and admit that it was all a joke: the ghost was a fake, and the gun contained blanks. The outraged dupe attacks one of the men. The man is saved by two attendants who have come to take Ferguson back to the local insane asylum he had just escaped from. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jean Short
- 1943
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Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's much-lauded epic Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which satirizes British traditionalism, stirred up impassioned hostilities and indignations among the Brits when released in 1943. It so infuriated Winston Churchill, in fact, that he refused to allow its exportation to other countries, particularly the U.S. When Blimp finally did premiere in the States in 1945, it screened in a drastically cut version. The sweeping story covers several decades. It begins at the tail end of the Boer War, when handsome young British officer Clive Candy, recently back from the battlefront, is infuriated by his discovery that Deutschland papers have played up the British atrocities in South Africa, propagandistically. He grows so irate, in fact, that he travels to Germany to address the problem. Once there, he meets an attractive British educator, Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr) who spends her days teaching English as a second language to German students. They grow close, but Candy so aggravates the local indigenes that he winds up in a duel with a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). The men wound each other and are sent to the same hospital, where they become friends. Candy - who doesn't yet realize he's fallen in love with Edith -- senses that Theo and Edith are attracted to one another, and encourages the couple's marital union. Candy subsequently returns to England, then falls for and marries Barbara (again played by Kerr), a nurse who bears a strong resemblance to Edith. She later dies, but Candy meets a third woman during WWII, Johnny (Kerr a third time), assigned to drive him from one locale to another during his campaigns. Meanwhile, Theo - disgusted by Nazi atrocities -- absconds to England, where he reencounters his old friend, now a prattering old shuffler rapidly approaching the end of his career and raving continuously about Nazi conduct (or lack thereof) in battle. Powell and Pressberger adapted Colonel Blimp from a comic strip; it became one of the hallmarks of their careers. ~ Sidney Jenkins, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, (more)
During its first season on Britain's ITV, The Avengers was by and large a "straight" espionage adventure series, with no sci-fi/fantasy trappings, and with two male secret agents -- Patrick Macnee as John Steed and Ian Hendry as Dr. David Keel -- handling the bulk of the action. Beginning with its second season, The Avengers adopts its more familiar format: fanciful, tongue-in-cheek spy shenanigans, occasionally incredible or downright improbable in nature, teaming Steed with a sexy female partner. In fact, during season two Steed is provided with two female teammates: Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman), a widowed anthropologist and martial-arts expert with a fondness for leather outfits, and Venus Smith (Julie Stevens), a nightclub singer who manages to perform one song in all of the six episodes in which she appears. Also, briefly upholding the "all-male" tradition established in season one, Steed is partnered in three episode with Dr. Martin King (Jon Rollason), who like his predecessor, has joined the secret service in order to avenge the death of a loved one, thereby tenuously "justifying" the series' title. By the middle of the second season, the popularity of Honor Blackman was such that Steed was permanently partnered with Cathy Gale. Not only is the character one of the first British action heroines who was thoroughly capable of fending for herself without the hero's help, but there is also the implication that Steed and Cathy are lovers in their off-hours. Although they seldom touch one another except in the line of duty, the warm and intimate verbal rapport between the two characters speaks volumes! Like season one, season two of The Avengers was produced in black-and-white and on videotape. Several of the season's 26 hour-long episodes survive, albeit in kinescope form. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Patrick Macnee, Honor Blackman, (more)
Season five of The Avengers carries over the same set of leading characters as season four: Patrick Macnee as prim, bowler-hatted British secret agent John Steed and Diana Rigg as Steed's "talented amateur" partner, demurely sexy martial-arts expert Mrs. Emma Peel. And no, the relationship between Mr. Steed and Mrs. Peel has still not progressed beyond the "professional" stage -- presumably because Emma's husband is not dead, only missing. This season's 26 episodes are the first to be filmed in color rather than black-and-white. The transition was made not out of any artistic consideration, but for purely economic reasons. The British-made The Avengers had scored a hit on American TV the previous season, and had been renewed by that country's ABC network, which in 1967 was boasting a "full-color" prime-time lineup, raking in huge advertising revenues as a result. While the switchover to color would eventually force the The Avengers to cut budgetary corners elsewhere, the season-five episodes maintain as high a standard of quality as had ever been seen on the series. Indeed, many fans consider such episodes as "From Venus With Love," "The Bird Who Knew Too Much," "The Correct Way to Kill," and "Epic" to be among The Avengers' finest (and funniest) outings. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, (more)
The Avengers' sixth season marks the first anniversary of the series' switchover from black-and-white to color -- and alas, the swan song for Diana Rigg in her signature role as leather-clad, demurely sexy martial-arts expert and amateur secret agent Mrs. Emma Peel. Fortunately, Rigg's co-star, Patrick Macnee, would remain in the role of soft-spoken, bowler-hatted, eminently resourceful professional spy John Steed until the series' final episode two years later. Although the budgets have been lowered on this season's abbreviated manifest of eight episodes, the series' action content and tongue-in-cheek scriptwork are still of the highest calibre. Highlights of The Avengers' sixth season include "Return of the Cybernauts," "You Have Just Been Murdered," "Murdersville," and the season finale, "Mission: Highly Improbable." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, (more)
By the time its third season rolled around, The Avengers was British television's most popular action-adventure series, and had gained an international reputation thanks to its tongue-in-cheek plot convolutions and the innuendo-laden rapport between its two leading characters: erudite, bowler-hatted secret agent John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and his "talented amateur" partner, the sexy, leather-clad martial arts expert Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman). However, the series had not yet been sold to the United States -- and indeed would not make the trip across the big pond until season four, by which time Honor Blackman had been replaced by Diana Rigg as Mrs. Emma Peel. Originally telecast in the U.K. from September 28, 1963, through March 21, 1964, the 26 hour-long episodes in The Avengers' third season were in black-and-white, and originally videotaped. Most of the surviving prints (which were not distributed in the U.S. until over two decades after their initial telecast) are in kinescope form. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Patrick Macnee, Honor Blackman, (more)
The fourth season of The Avengers was the first season to be telecast in the United States, the first to be filmed rather than videotaped -- and, most importantly, the first to feature Diana Rigg. When series co-star Honor Blackman decided to leave the series at the end of the third season to revitalize her film career (which she did, spectacularly, as "Pussy Galore" in Goldfinger), the search began for an attractive and athletic actress who could successfully fill Blackman's boots as the very resourceful, very sexy partner of bowler-hatted British secret agent John Steed (Patrick Macnee). Like Blackman's character, Cathy Gale, the new "Avenger girl," Emma Peel, is a talented amateur whose sang-froid in the face of danger, to say nothing of her outstanding martial-arts skills, come in quite handy whenever Steed -- and by extension the British government -- needs a good operative to smash an enemy spy ring or stop a maniacal master criminal in his tracks. The producers' first choice to play the leather-clad Mrs. Peel ("Mrs." because her husband has been missing and presumed dead for several years) was actress Elizabeth Shepherd; however, after appearing in one "test" episode, "The Town of No Return," Shepherd was deemed competent but unsuitable, and Diana Rigg was brought in to appear in the refilmed version of the above-mentioned episode. As it turned out, Rigg was perfect for the role, and she would remain as Mrs. Peel for the next three seasons.
Unlike Honor Blackman's subtly sensuous and down-to-earth Cathy Gale, Diana Rigg's Emma Peel is charmingly aristocratic and aloof. Also, in contrast with the implied intimate after-hours relationship between Cathy and Steed, it is abundantly clear that Mrs. Peel keeps Mr. Steed safely at arm's length -- though the twinkle in her eye, and that inimitable sly smile, suggests that she might not be entirely averse to a fling with her partner should the opportunity arise! Even so, Cathy Gale and Emma Peel have a lot in common, including a predilection for getting trapped in campily perilous predicaments: indeed, in her second Avengers episode, "The Gravediggers," Mrs. Peel is snugly tied to a railroad track as a deadly model train bears down on her and a tinkling silent-movie-style piano is heard in the background! Although not the first episode in which Diana Rigg appears, the first Avengers to be seen on American TV was the legendary "The Cybernauts," an outlandish sci-fi outing which perfectly exemplifies how far the series had come from its earlier "realistic" episodes. Of the remaining fourth-season installments, five were removed from the original American network run because they were deemed too provocative. These include "A Surfeit of H20," "Silent Dust," "The Quick-Quick Slow Death," "A Touch of Brimstone," and "Honey for the Prince" -- the latter offering the spectacle of Diana Rigg in a belly-dancer outfit, replete with a jewel in her navel. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Unlike Honor Blackman's subtly sensuous and down-to-earth Cathy Gale, Diana Rigg's Emma Peel is charmingly aristocratic and aloof. Also, in contrast with the implied intimate after-hours relationship between Cathy and Steed, it is abundantly clear that Mrs. Peel keeps Mr. Steed safely at arm's length -- though the twinkle in her eye, and that inimitable sly smile, suggests that she might not be entirely averse to a fling with her partner should the opportunity arise! Even so, Cathy Gale and Emma Peel have a lot in common, including a predilection for getting trapped in campily perilous predicaments: indeed, in her second Avengers episode, "The Gravediggers," Mrs. Peel is snugly tied to a railroad track as a deadly model train bears down on her and a tinkling silent-movie-style piano is heard in the background! Although not the first episode in which Diana Rigg appears, the first Avengers to be seen on American TV was the legendary "The Cybernauts," an outlandish sci-fi outing which perfectly exemplifies how far the series had come from its earlier "realistic" episodes. Of the remaining fourth-season installments, five were removed from the original American network run because they were deemed too provocative. These include "A Surfeit of H20," "Silent Dust," "The Quick-Quick Slow Death," "A Touch of Brimstone," and "Honey for the Prince" -- the latter offering the spectacle of Diana Rigg in a belly-dancer outfit, replete with a jewel in her navel. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, (more)
Part of a three-tape set, this video investigates some of the people and places on the frontiers of our understanding. Viewers will meet a doctor who says he has proof of life after death, and a woman whose ailment might have roots in a past life. Viewers will also spend a night hunting ghosts with a British paranormal research team. ~ Rob Ferrier, All Movie Guide
