Find and Destroy

In this film, Drake (Patrick McGoohan) is planning on going on vacation but keeps getting called on assignments. Even when he finally goes to Brazil, he's called into action to try to either recover a small British sub or destroy it so the enemy doesn't get its hands on it. So, he dons a lot of silly dark makeup and pretends to be a local fisherman(!). But he doesn't remain in this disguise very long (probably because it sucked!) and locates the people who found the sub. He agrees to pay them more than enemy agents would pay and they are thrilled. However, when the bad guys soon show up, Drake needs to either fight them (and he'd be killed) or he needs to pretend he's working with them to buy time. Naturally, this leads to a nifty finale.

The idea for this is very good and the episode worked a bit better than average. Like most episodes, it would have worked better as an hour-long show--still, it's well worth seeing.

Pat goes on vacay to Rio De Janeiro in this peculiar segment, so poorly done as to suggest an attempt at comic relief.

He improvises on a non-mission when a commander from British intelligence commandeers him to blow up a lost experimental submarine that has washed ashore and could be of great value to enemy agents.

A fine movie director Charles Frend is credited with this junker, which has many things wrong with it. The cast's accents vary and do not match the Rio setting; beach scenes are shot in the studio and there's no atmosphere of Brazil at all; and Pat's acting is miserable. None of the characters' behavior is believable and the ending is especially stupid.

One very odd element is the casting of Peter Sallis as Henry Gordon, Pat's boss back in America, and Helen Horton in a sort of Miss Moneypenny role. They comfortably play in the opening scene as if they were good old series regulars on "Danger Man", but this is their only appearance, near the end of the only 30-minute length season.

Even stranger, either a coincidence or more likely an item worth researching, is the fact that leading lady Nadja Regin co-starred in a minor British movie in 1962, a year after this episode aired, titled "Number Six", based on a 1928 novel by Edgar Wallace. The title Number Six referred to a mysterious secret agent. Sounds familiar? Of course, Patrick McGoohan starred as the iconic secret agent Number Six in his classic 1967 TV series "The Prisoner". Hmm...

Yugoslavian movie star and sex bomb Nadja Regin looked bustier than usual as the Brazilian Melina although they dressed her in a baggy cowgirl shirt. She impressed American audiences as the hot girlfriend of Kerim Bey in From Russia With Love and the topheavy bellydancer in Goldfinger who gets whacked on the head in the first 5 minutes. Of course Drake, as usual, is more interested in the submarine than in her twin torpedoes. Excellent villain Peter Arne had a better role in Colony 3, one of the hour long episodes of Danger Man.