The Cold War was still frozen in place when "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." debuted in September 1964, less than two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Beatles had arrived, however, and the cultural temperature beyond the marble corridors of power had begun to warm. The program's novel premise, visually cued by the United Nations building at the start of each episode during season one, involved a secretive global spy agency drawing personnel from both sides of the Iron Curtain to fight common enemies.
At the time the idea of American and Soviet agents working in tandem must have struck superpatriots as treasonous. Along with other indicators, including the popular film comedy The Russians are Coming, "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." represented a crack in the Cold War ice. The program was unusual enough to leave an impression, especially on younger viewers, during its 1964-1968 run.
Every episode has now been released in one of the most elaborate DVD sets ever, packaged as a tool kit and loaded with for once! interesting and illuminating bonus material. Altogether, "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: The Complete Series" is comprised of 41 discs with 105 episodes and nearly 10 hours of special features.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E., appeared two years after the first James Bond movie and in many respects transposed the Ian Fleming sensibility to the smaller screens of network television. Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) was an American Ivy League analog to Sean Connery's Bond, a bespoke tailored man who knew his way around a martini lounge. It was his Russian sidekick, Illya Kuryakin (David MaCallum), who stood out in the popular culture of the day, geopolitically and in terms of the rising sensibility of youth. Dressed in a mod black suit, often with matching turtleneck, Kuryakin seemed like a peer to the show's younger viewers. He even infiltrated a rock band as their bassist in one episode. The girls found him cute, where Solo resembled one of dad's lecherous friends from the office.
The show's producers, steeped in the Hugh Hefner sensibility, encouraged lechery. Solo embodied the early Playboy image of an upper middle class, white male professional with a liberated libido and a wandering eye. Watching scenes in slow forward, it's clear that Solo could pass no woman without mentally measuring her breasts. That most women embraced his oily advances speaks loudly about Playboy fantasies of the pre-feminist working gal. They were always available to a man with the right touch. Kuryakin, on the other hand, was often monkishly professional. And like a rock star, he was more likely fending off women than seeking them out.
Filmed in black and white, season one was often noirish with deep shadows and jarring camera angles. The jazz soundtrack was largely conceived by Jerry Goldsmith, who went on to a successful career in film scores. With season two, the show blossomed in bright pop art color and, thanks to arrangements by Lalo Shiffrin, the music edged closer to rock. The tone shifted from year to year, with season three reaching a campy nadir. In most episodes, humor and seriousness ran hand in hand. Despite preposterous plotting, "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." functioned as a fun house refraction of real world headlines, transposing global anxiety into a game of hide and seek, a series of improbable capers. U.N.C.L.E. was often pitted against Thrush, a well-financed corporate crime syndicate that sought to undermine the governments of the world and dominate the affairs of humanity. Solo and Kuryakin also contended with an array of eccentric independent megalomaniacs, many of whom could have been Bond villains.
"The Man From U.N.C.L.E." was not great and enduring art but almost always maintained the surface appearance of cool. It was as much a part of the weave of its time as Carnaby Street, spaghetti westerns and its analog on British television, "The Avengers." It took several months for this innovative program to overcome indifferent ratings and find its audience. Nowadays, nervous networks wouldn't have given it a chance.
