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This is yet another of Patrick McGoohan's fine performances. As Dr. Syn, McGoohan is a gentle but wise Vicar. Yet when he transforms into the Scarecrow he acts and sounds like the roughest dock-dweller you would ever want to avoid. It's a role that showcases McGoohan's remarkable range.

The story is sort of a what-if. In this case, what if the people of Britain had the same strong spirit of freedom that Americans possessed in their revolutionary past. The Scarecrow and his gang are "smugglers", i.e. free-market traders who avoid heavy excise taxes by the state. McGoohan, who is a Libertarian in real life, must have approved of the script.

Today, with sleepy populations in both the USA and Britain accepting a tax rate close to 50%, strong state control, speech-laws (aka "hate" laws) and tariffs on imported goods, it makes me wonder where all the revolutionary Scarecrow's have disappeared.

The film is well made with good performances by Victor the wild child as well as Truffaut as his doctor and father figure.

Truffaut's main concern is studying what humans really are when you strip away the socialization process. Do we have morals? Language abilities? Compassion? This was also the main question for Dr. Itard who raised the boy after he was found.

However, the legitimacy of the wild child is called into question early in the film. Is Victor a normal human child or was there something abnormal about him that caused his family to abandon him? If he was abnormal to begin with, then we really can't conclude anything about what humanity would be like without the socialization process.

Reading through Dr. Itard's notes, many have concluded that Victor was an autistic child. His parents probably found him uncontrollable and abandoned him in the woods. So while Dr. Itard believed he was seeing the results of a normal boy with no socialization, he was probably seeing the results of a normal autistic child.

Despite this problem, the film is still interesting to watch but it ends up raising more questions than it answers.