THE CORRIDOR PEOPLE

THE CORRIDOR PEOPLE is very obscure, and unsurprisingly so. Made in 1966 – and remember THE AVENGERS tv show was in full swing well before then — it doesn’t know if it wants to be modernist spoof or surreal drama, or modernist drama (there is some weirdly adult biting dialogue and surprising emergences of sex) or surreal spoof (on a fraction of THE AVENGERS’ budget). It is, in theory, the story of a British covert security department and the wars waged between it and a vengeful female criminal mastermind in a world of high science and low magic. In practise? There are moments where it plays like “what if the LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN team remade CALLAN?” This is a few years before McGoohan’s THE PRISONER, and you wonder what the reaction to CORRIDOR PEOPLE would have been if they’d dropped the broad comedy. (Which I presume was there to smooth off the weirdness and edginess.)

As Kim Newman notes:

…profound thought has gone into this – in ‘Birdwatcher’, Kronk reports to his superiors, a dark roomful of varied establishment types (bishop, general, cricketer, etc) who stand on pedestals and rant clichés at each other. It could as easily have come from an avant garde theatre piece as a Monty Python sketch, and it’s possible that this loose committee of the country’s clueless owners are the eponymous corridor people (the title is never referred to in dialogue).

Note also that the scene he refers to becomes quite chilling. Before it turns into a Greek chorus reciting “Breathes There The Man” by Sir Walter Scott. It’s peculiar. For all its ridiculousness, an oddly haunting piece of work.

THE CORRIDOR PEOPLE (UK) (US+) – REGION 2 ONLY