The Persuaders!

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The Persuaders!
Moore + Curtis in The Persuaders! (1971/72)
Also known as	Amicalement Vôtre Attenti a Quei Due Dos tipos audaces Die Zwei
Format	Action Adventure
Created by	Robert S. Baker
Directed by	Leslie Norman Roy Ward Baker Basil Dearden Peter Hunt Val Guest Sidney Hayers Roger Moore
Starring	Tony Curtis Roger Moore Laurence Naismith
Theme music composer	John Barry
Composer(s)	Ken Thorne David Lindup
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of episodes	24
Production
Executive producer(s)	Robert S. Baker
Supervising producer(s)	Johnny Goodman
Associate producer(s)	Terry Nation
Co-producer(s)	Roger Moore (uncredited)
Story editor(s)	Terry Nation Milton S. Gelman Walter Black
Editor(s)	Peter Pitt Bert Rule Derek Chambers
Location(s)	Pinewood Studios and locations throughout Europe
Running time	50 min.
Broadcast
Original channel	ITV
Original run	September 17, 1971 – February 25, 1972
External links
IMDb profile

The Persuaders! is a 1971 crime series, produced by ITC Entertainment for initial broadcast on ITV and ABC. It has been called "the last major entry in the cycle of adventure series that had begun eleven years earlier with Danger Man in 1960", as well as "the most ambitious and most expensive of Sir Lew Grade's international action adventure series".^[1]

It starred Tony Curtis, as Danny Wilde, and Roger Moore, as Lord Brett Sinclair, two international playboys. Much of the humor of the show derived from playful observations about the differences between American and British customs. The show ended after one season because it failed on US television.^[2]

Despite the focus on the British and American markets, the show was popular elsewhere. ^[2] It was allegedly sold to "every country in the world except Russia, China and Albania".^[3] It won its highest awards from Australia and Spain,^[4] while Moore and Curtis were decorated in Germany and France for their acting. It persists in the memory of European filmmakers and audiences, having been casually referenced in 21st century productions from Sweden, Britain and Germany.^[5]

The concept began to receive renewed attention from the mainstream press when a Hollywood re-make was announced in 2005.^[6]

Contents 1 Premise 2 Signature elements 2.1 Title sequence 2.2 The cars 3 Production 4 The Curtis and Moore relationship 5 Reception 5.1 Initial runs in the UK and US 5.2 Radical dubbing key to European popularity 5.3 Modern re-releases 6 Awards 7 Influence and Remake 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Premise

The Persuaders! are two equally-matched men from different backgrounds who reluctantly team together to solve cases the courts cannot.

• Danny Wilde (Tony Curtis) is a rough diamond educated and moulded in the back slums of New York City who escaped by enlisting in the U.S. Navy. He later became an oil business millionaire.
• Lord Brett Sinclair (Roger Moore) is a polished Harrow- and Oxford-educated English aristocrat. He is an ex-racing car driver who addresses his comrade-in-arms as "Daniel".

Now globe-trotting playboys, the men meet on holiday in the French Riviera, instantly disliking each other and destroying a hotel bar with their fistfight. Arrested, they are delivered to retired Judge Fulton (Laurence Naismith) who offers them the choice of ninety days in jail or help him right errors of impunity. Grudgingly, Wilde and Sinclair agree and solve Fulton's initial case. He then releases them from any threat of jail.

It remains unclear why the duo remain a team under Fulton's loose leadership. Fulton recurs in the series, however, he has no formal relationship with his two agents. Several episodes depict his finding a way to convince Wilde and Sinclair to act in his behalf. In Angie, Angie he easily convinces one of the pair. In The Man in the Middle he endangers his agents so that they must act in his behalf. When Wilde and Sinclair are short of cash, he lures them with money. In Powerswitch he manipulates events from the shadows, Sinclair and Wilde not knowing of the Judge's involvement.

In Five Miles to Midnight, Sinclair tells Joan Collins's character that he personally works for the judge because it has given him something worthwhile to do after his failed motor racing career; Wilde never reveals nor explains his reasons.

[edit] Signature elements

Besides the premise and the characters, The Persuaders is distinguished from other television series by signature elements: the title sequence and the cars of the protagonists.

[edit] Title sequence

The Persuaders titles and synthesizer theme, by John Barry^[7] establish the background and current identities of the protagonists via split-screen narrative technique: ^[8] two folders, one red, one blue, labelled Danny Wilde and Brett Sinclair simultaneously narrate their lives. As the biographies approach their current ages, the screen splits diagonally, connoting their excitingly peripatetic lifestyles. The conclusion shows them together enjoying a life of sport, drink, women, and gambling.

Contemporaneously, the title sequence is subjected to respectful fan parody on YouTube, ^[9][10] and retains a cinematic technique cachét among professional film editors. In 2007, France 2 satirically used it to introduce a report about relations between French President Nicholas Sarkozy and his Prime Minister François Fillon.^[11] Moreover, the same channel reprised the satire for the 13 October 2007 episode of On n'est pas couché about the strained relationship between McLaren Formula One drivers Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso.

[edit] The cars

The protagonists drive signature cars: Danny Wilde drives a red Ferrari 246 Dino, Brett Sinclair drives a Bahama Yellow Aston Martin DBS with V8 wheels and markings. As with Simon Templar, Lord Brett Sinclair's car has personalised number plates of his initials; Templar’s were “ST 1”, Sinclair’s “BS 1”. In fact, true owner Billy Smart, Jr permitted their fictional use.^[12] Danny Wilde’s Ferrari (Number plate Mo22 1400) was not U.K.-registered. His car’s initial appearance in the pilot episode “Overture” implies Lord Lew Grade has lent it to him.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Production

The concept of The Persuaders originated in one of the final episodes of The Saint titled "The Ex-King of Diamonds", wherein Simon Templar (Moore) is partner with a Texas oilman (Stuart Damon) in a Monte Carlo gambling adventure. Liking that combination, Robert S. Baker and Lew Grade funded a new series. Unusually, production of the series began and continued without contracts among the producers and Moore.^[13] Moreover, Moore's role as producer is not obvious from watching the series, but Curtis confirmed the fact: Roger was always like the host with the show, because it was his company that was producing it. I would say he was the largest independent owner of it; Roger and his company owned it with Bob Baker, and Sir Lew owned the rest of it.

At the time, the twenty-four episode The Persuaders! was the most expensive British television series produced, each episode costing £100,000, for location filming in France, Spain, Sweden, and Italy, and star salaries. One of the series' unusual production aspects was that Roger Moore was — officially and practically — his own wardrobe artist, stemming from genuine sartorial interest and marketing his line of clothes by the Pearson and Foster firm. ^[14].

[edit] The Curtis and Moore relationship

There is much speculation about the professional relationship between Roger Moore and Tony Curtis on- and off-set. In her autobiography Second Act, Joan Collins detailed how they did not get along when she was a guest star. She cited Curtis's foul temper for why the set of the "Five Miles to Midnight" episode was tense. Episode director Val Guest, in a 2005 interview to the British Film Institute confirmed Collins's assessment of Curtis:^[15]

Yes, it was great fun doing The Persuaders, despite Tony Curtis. [laughter] I'll tell you a funny story about that:

Tony was on pot at the time, and I used to have to say "Oh, go and have a smoke'm", because he always had some gripe of some kind, and, one day, we were shooting on the Croisette, in Cannes, and we’d been roped off our little thing, and there were crowds all around watching us film and everything, and Tony Curtis came down to do his scene and he was just carrying on at the wardrobe saying, "You didn’t do this, and you should have done that . . . and in Hollywood you would have been fired . . . ." And dear Roger Moore walked over, took him by the lapels, looked him straight in the eyes and said, "And to think those lips once kissed Piper Laurie". [laughter] Well, the whole of the Croisette collapsed, the unit collapsed, and, I must, say even Tony had to laugh, but we were asked to do another . . . we got the award that year for the best TV series, I think it was, and they wanted to do a repeat, and I remember Roger saying, "With Tony Curtis, not on your life", and he went on to become James Bond, so he did all right.

—Val Guest, Director

In his autobiography, Still Dancing, Lew Grade notes that the actors, Didn't hit it off all that well, because of different work ethics. Despite third-party claims, Curtis and Moore consistently maintain they had an amicable working relationship. Moore says. Tony and I had a good on- and off-screen relationship, we are two very different people, but we did share a sense of humour.^[2]

In a 2005 interview,^[16] Curtis referred to Moore with affection, yet revealed he would not participate in a remake of The Persuaders! without Moore.

[edit] Reception

[edit] Initial runs in the UK and US

Lew Grade was always keen to break into the American TV market, which is why he kept coming up with series featuring American actors (Man in a Suitcase, The Champions). Failure to do so would often lead to cancellation.^[1] The series made little impact in the US, where it aired opposite Mission: Impossible on Saturday nights. It was very much a case of "mission impossible" for the British series to "persuade" audiences to switch over ^[1] despite the fact that Impossible was itself not in the top 30 of all programs in 1971.^[17] The show was pulled by ABC before all 24 episodes were shown.

Four pairs of episodes from the series were re-edited into four individual TV movies for the ITC American market, entitled The Switch, Mission: Monte Carlo, Sporting Chance and London Conspiracy. A fifth episode pairing was planned simply entitled The Persuaders but never completed. This format, too, did little to spark American interest.

In Britain, the show fared better, placing easily in the top 20 of all shows in 1971. ^[18]

[edit] Radical dubbing key to European popularity

Despite the American disappointment, the series sold well outside the UK and US, which allowed it to be profitable soon after principal photography was completed.^[3] Beyond simply making the initial sale, the series was popular with viewers in Continental Europe, especially in Germany, France and Italy, where it is still regularly repeated^[2].

However, there is a body of evidence to suggest that the German version, in particular, was so changed by the dubbing process as to be a substantively different program.^[13] The French version was in fact a translation of the German version instead of the English original - and was also successful. A German fan has asserted that the German dubbing was "a unique mixture of streetslang (sic) and ironic tongue-in-cheek remarks" and that it "even mentioned Lord Sinclair becoming 007 at one or two occasions".^[19] It also frequently included remarks about the film itself like "Junge, lass doch die Sprüche, die setzen ja die nächste Folge ab!" (Stop that gags - they'll cancel the series) or about the dubbing: "Du musst jetzt etwas schneller werden, sonst bist Du nicht synchron" (Talk faster, you aren't in sync any more).

This is backed by a 2005 doctoral dissertation at the University of Hamburg. In it, Nicole Baumgarten takes note of "qualitative content analyses of 15 episodes" of The Persuaders versus the German version, Die Zwei. Baumgarten interprets these 1978 analyses as having proven

... that the linguistic changes entailed by the process of translation result in radically different characterizations of the protagonists of the series. The language use in the translations is characterized by a greater degree of sexual explicitness and verbal violence as well as an unveiled pro-American attitude, which is not found in the source texts.^[20]

—Nicole Baumgarten, writing about Toepser-Ziegert's 1978 treatise, Theorie und Praxis der Filmsynchronisation

She goes on to put the matter more plainly, saying that the only common element between the The Persuaders and Die Zwei is the visual information. CBS News investigated the German dubbing industry in 2006, where they, too, confirmed substantial differences between the German and English-language versions of The Persuaders!^[21] In trying to assess the reasons why such a radical change was made, CBS discovered that German dubbing artists believed that "staying exactly true to the original is not always the highest aim." This spirit was invoked by the person who oversaw the adaption and also performed Tony Curtis' role:

When a company says they want something to be commercially successful, to make people laugh, I give it a woof. I make them laugh like they would in a Bavarian beer garden.

—Rainer Brandt, co-ordinator of the German dubbing of The Persuaders and voice for Tony Curtis in the dubbing.

It has been argued that an important reason for the vast differences between localized versions of The Persuaders! owes significantly to the nature of the piece.

One of the most endearing features of the old British series The Persuaders was the abyss between the accents and registers of Tony Curtis, the self-made millionaire Danny Wild (sic), born in the Brooklyn slums, and Roger Moore, the most polished Lord Sinclair. But how could it have been preserved in Spanish? By turning Curtis into a low class Caracan and Moore into an aristocratic Madrileño? Here not even the approach that works with My Fair Lady would be of any avail; different sociolects of the same vernacular will not do—much less in subtitling, where all differences in accent are irreparably lost.^[22]

—Sergio Viaggio, A General Theory of interlingual Mediation

The Persuaders!, Vaggio argues, needed to be different on the Continent because a strict translation simply would not have made sense to local audiences.

[edit] Modern re-releases

The series' popularity in Britain earned it re-runs on Channel 4, Granada Plus, and ITV4 in the 1990s and 2000s. When the pilot episode Overture was screened as part of Channel 4's nostalgia strand TV Heaven in 1992, that series' host, Frank Muir, said in a Radio Times interview that The Persuaders "must have been the best bad series ever made ... absolute hokum", however, BBC Radio 5 presenter Dave Aldridge asked "Was seventies TV really this good?"

In Germany the complete series had a re-run in the second half of 2007, and is said to have attracted a new generation of fans.

The entire series was remastered for DVD release in Europe in 2001. In 2006, because of its popularity in Britain, a 9-Disc DVD special edition boxed set was released, with extra material to the complete, uncut, re-mastered twenty-four episode series. Few episodes made The Persuaders! a difficult sale for U.S. syndication, however, in recent years the proliferation of cable networks made possible re-running single-season programs. The terms of one such re-run on A&E Network allowed for a Region 1 DVD release in 2003.

[edit] Awards

• Winner - Logie Award 1972 Best Overseas Drama (Australia)
• Winner - TP de Oro Award 1973 Best Foreign Series (Spain)
• Winner - Bambi 1973 for Curtis and Moore (Germany)

[edit] Influence and Remake

The concept of a partnership between a rough American from the city backstreets and a sophisticated British aristocrat was to be used again in the cop action drama Dempsey & Makepeace in the mid-1980s, starring Michael Brandon and Glynis Barber.

A motion picture remake was first announced in 2005. It was originally expected to star Steve Coogan and co-producer Ben Stiller,^[23] but it has since been announced that it will star Hugh Grant and George Clooney.^[24]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• The Persuaders! at the Internet Movie Database
• Cult TV
• Tony Curtis Official Forum
• Roger Moore Official Site
• Titles & Air Dates Guide
• the official Persuaders appreciation society
• Tributes to The Persuaders
• Forum Thread
• Television Heaven
• Nostalgia Central
• TV Ratings
• Buy the DVD Box Set
• The Theme LP
• The Opening Titles
• The Persuaders on Ebay
• Roger & Tony reunited!
• Ferrari Dino Website & Forum
• Aston Martin Website