'The Manchurian Candidate' (1962) and the Cold War brainwashing scare

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 75-94

  Carruthers, Susan L ^a  

^a ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0042596836     PISSN: 01439685     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01439689800260031     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1996), pp. 211-212
2. Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie: and other episodes in political demonology (Berkeley, 1987), p. 252
3. Richard Combs, The Manchurian Candidate, Monthly Film Bulletin, 55 (1988), pp. 280-281
4. Peter John Dyer, Film reviews, Sight and Sound (Winter 1962), pp. 36-37
5. In 1988 another British reviewer suggested that the film chopped between 'satire, political melodrama, military derring-do, Oedipal tragedy and post-Freudian joke', Combs Monthly Film Bulletin, op. cit., p. 281
6. That phrase was coined - albeit in a rather different context - by Richard Hofstadter in a lecture delivered at Oxford in November 1963. It is reprinted in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (London, 1966), pp. 3-40
7. 'Unless you understand Marxism in both its pre-and post-Stalin manifestations, and have followed closely the intellectual ins-and-outs of US Communists and fellow travellers, The Manchurian Candidate will seem so incomprehensible you will wonder why it was made', wrote one disgruntled reviewer; Arthur B. Clark, Films in Review, 13 (ix) (November 1962), p. 558
8. J. Hoberman, When Dr No met Dr Strangelove, Sight and Sound, 3, (ii) (December 1993), p. 19
9. Hoberman, Sight and Sound, op. cit., p. 19
10. Gerald Pratley, The Cinema of John Frankenheimer (London, 1969), p. 98
11. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, op. cit., p. 213
12. According to Brian Case, reporting a conversation with George Axelrod (the film's scriptwriter), Arthur Krim, head of United Artists and national finance chairman for the Democrats, thought that Kennedy's pre-Cuba rapprochement with Krushchev might be jeopardised by the film. Krim therefore wanted to pull the project in pre-production. Sinatra (persuaded by Axelrod to read Condon's novel) then spent a weekend with Kennedy at Hyannisport. Already a fan of the book, the president's only anxiety was over 'who plays the mother?'; Time Out, 938 (10 August 1988), p. 35
13. Michael Scheinfeld offers a useful corrective to the commonly cited belief that the film entirely disappeared during these years, pointing out that the film was shown by CBS in 1965 and 1966 and by NBC in 1974 and 1975. He speculates that the film's 'disappearance' in between times and prior to the 1988 rerelease, was more probably due to 'hoarding', calculated to drive up its value, and highten interest, prior to reissue; The Manchurian Candidate, Films in Review, 39(xi) (November 1988), pp. 538-546
14. However, cock-up theories and conspiracies still jostle for attention. Some suggest that financial disputes between Sinatra and UA explain the delayed rerelease; R. Corliss, From failure to cult classic, Time (3 March 1988), p. 84
15. One source has Condon naming Krim as the film's suppressor; Nigel Fountain, Why was The Manchurian Candidate buried for 26 years?, City Limits, 359 (18 August 1988), p. 22
16. However, Thomas Doherty advances a 'screw up' theory, referring to Sinatra's appearance on the Larry King Show, during which he claimed not to have known he held the rights until Condon told King, on an earlier show, that Sinatra was keeping the film back. Sinatra thus claimed the film simply 'fell through the cracks'; A second look, Cinéaste, 16, (iv) (1988), p. 31
17. American 're-educational' efforts are discussed in Kenneth K. Hansen, Heroes Behind Barbed Wire (Princeton, 1957)
18. William L. White, The Captives of Korea (Westport, 1957)
19. and Ron Robin, The Barbed-Wire College. Re-educating German POWs in the United States during World War II (Princeton, 1995), pp. 165-167
20. In an ironic inversion of the 'totalitarian' theme, Americans, who berated the communists' undue concern with control over individual souls, found it hard to accept the figurative loss of 21 individuals to the other side. This led one American social scientist to muse 'Is it possible that we share in common with the Communists a lack of security in our own ideological beliefs, even though we both proclaim our confidence that we have the true way of life? A single American soldier converted to Communism could arouse feelings of anxiety and guilt over one's own repressed ideological doubts'; R.A. Bauer, Brainwashing: psychology or demonology, Journal of Social Issues, 12, (iii) (1957), p. 47
21. Having been subjected to intense demands from their communist captors to fill in endless questionnaires and provide 'life stories', the POWs on their release found themselves confronted with a 77 page battery of questions about their captivity; Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: the inner history of the Cold War (New York, 1995), p. 101
22. Albert Biderman, March to Calumny. The story of the American POWs in the Korean War (New York, 1963), p. 1
23. Doherty, Cinéaste, op. cit., p. 30
24. The Rack (Arnold Laven, MGM, US, 1956)
25. Variety (17 October 1962), p. 10
26. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (London, 1957)
27. Pratley, The Cinema of John Frankenheimer, op. cit., p. 100
28. Intriguingly, Hollywood's critique of television seems to have almost entirely bypassed contemporary critics, except for Arthur B. Clark, who, somewhat missing the point, complained about The Manchurian Candidate's 'excessive amount of advertising' for products such as Kleenex, Pepsi and 'Heinz catsup'; Films in Review, op. cit., p. 558
29. Doherty, Cineaste, op. cit., p. 31
30. See also Edward Hunter, Brainwashing (New York, 1956, p. 43)
31. Denise Winn makes this assertion about Hunter in The Manipulated Mind. Brainwashing, conditioning and indoctrination (London, 1983), p. 2
32. J.A.C. Brown, Techniques of Persuasion: from propaganda to brainwashing (Harmondsworth, 1963), p. 268
33. Gleason, Totalitarianism, op. cit., pp. 94-95
34. Hunter, Brainwashing, p. 4
35. As well as his October 1950 article for the Miami News ("Brainwashing" tactics force Chinese into ranks of Communist Party) in which the term was apparently coined, Hunter also wrote Brainwashing in Red China (New York, 1951)
36. William Sargant, Battle for the Mind. A physiology of conversion and 'brainwashing' (New York, 1957)
37. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (London, 1959)
38. and Condon himself, whose novel goes further than the film into explaining the Pavlovian mechanics of the brainwashing process, The Manchurian Candidate (1960), pp. 33-54
39. It should be noted, however, that more serious academic students of 'totalitarianism' also saw the spectre of Pavlov (though sometimes rather more figuratively) in totalitarian efforts to condition human behaviour: see, for example, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 2nd edn, 1958), pp. 437-438
40. Bauer, Journal of Social Issues, op. cit., p. 41
41. The phrase was used by General Clark (UN Commander in the Far East) defending Colonel Frank Schwable, reported in the London Times (25 February 1953), p. 7
42. See also Biderman, March to Calumny, op. cit., p. 201
43. State Department memorandum of February 1953, cited by Callum MacDonald, Korea: the war before Vietnam (New York, 1986), p. 152
44. On the Armed Forces' ambivalent attitudes towards the culpability of the 'collaborators' see also Gladwin Hill, Brain-washing: time for a policy, The Atlantic Monthly, 195, (iv) (April 1955), pp. 58-62
45. Eugene Kinkead, Why They Collaborated (London, 1960)
46. As William Peters pointed out, 'The book poses as a factual report of a massive Army study of POW behaviour, issued with the stamp of approval of the US Department of Defense. Actually it represents the views of a small group of US officers and officials, the Defense Department's "approval" consisting solely of a statement that no classified information is revealed. In the entire book only ten individuals are quoted, of whom two are anonymous and only one is identified as a former POW'; When the Army debunks the Army, Encounter (15 July 1960), p. 77
47. Kinkead, Why They Collaborated, op. cit., p. 18
48. For this literature see Biderman, March to Calumny, op. cit., and Communist attempts to elicit false confessions from Air Force prisoners of war, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 33, (ix) (September 1957), pp. 616-625
49. Robert Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. A study of 'brainwashing' in China (London, 1961)
50. and Home by ship: reaction patterns of American prisoners of war repatriated from North Korea, American Journal of Psychiatry, 110 (1954), pp. 732-739
51. Edgar Schein, Reaction patterns to severe, chronic, stress in American army prisoners of war of the Chinese, Journal of Social Issues, XII, (iii) (1957), pp. 21-30
52. and L. Hinkle & H. Wolff, Communist interrogation and indoctrination of "enemies of the state", American Medical Association, Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 76 (1957), pp. 116-174
53. See also Patrick Gibbs in the London Daily Telegraph (10 November 1962), p. 11
54. The Daily Cinema, 8674 (16 October 1962), p. 9
55. Rogin, e Movie, op. cit., p. 252
56. Whitfield (1996) calls Rogin's interpretation 'dubious', The Culture of the Cold War, op. cit., p. 212
57. Virginia Pasley, 22 Stayed. The story of 21 American GIs and one Briton who chose communist China - who they were and and the reason for their choice (London, 1955), p. 220
58. The press book contains an item on Frankenheimer entitled 'I like to annoy'. The story about the pickets, which he regarded as proving his point about 'the absurdity of any type of extremism' is recounted in Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood directors speak (New York, 1969), p. 81
59. Clark, Films in Review, op. cit., p. 558
60. Not all critics concurred, however. Dyer wrote in Sight and Sound that the 'neatly ironic idea of a McCarthy being in effect a Communist tool seems a perfectly logical extension of the facts as we now know them' (though which 'facts' he had in mind remain unclear); op. cit., p. 36
61. In this respect it has been suggested that the film served to heighten belief in communist subversion within. Joel Kovel, for example, writes that The Manchurian Candidate had a powerful effect on James Jesus Angleton, who read it as encouragement to search for a Soviet mole in the CIA, spurred on by the Soviet defector, Anatoly Golitsyn; Red Hunting in the Promised Land (London, 1997), p. 166
62. See Gleason, Totalitarianism, op. cit., passim. The way in which the USSR has been interpreted as Nazi Germany's mirror received one of its earliest scholarly explorations in Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson's, Red fascism: the merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American image of totalitarianism, 1930's-50's, American Historical Review, LXXV (iv) (April 1970), pp. 1046-1064
63. The more usual liberal criticism of McCarthyism - that it inadvertently helped the Soviets, not least as it mimetically reproduced certain totalitarian excesses and thereby undermined American democracy - is voiced in the film by the ACLU-supporting Senator Jordan (Raymond's father-in-law, and one of his victims) when he opines that 'if John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent he could not do more harm to this country than he is doing now'. In Condon's novel Raymond Shaw expresses a similar sentiment: 'Iselin is laying a foundation for the agencies of American government to serve totalitarian ends rather than the Government of the United States as we have hitherto known it'; The Manchurian Candidate, op. cit., p. 195
64. Combs, Monthly Film Bulletin, op. cit., p. 281
65. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, op. cit., p. 253
66. In the novel, this motivation is made somewhat more explicit, though still rooted in dysfunctional family relationships: mother's incestuous love of her own father, her resentment at his death and her brother's attempt to usurp his role as pater familias, all ensure that she enters his chosen profession - politics - in order to exact her revenge. But this still does not make clear why she should have become a communist agent; Condon, The Manchurian Candidate, op. cit., pp. 69-70
67. As Schein concluded: 'the indoctrination was not very effective but the social control exercised by the Chinese Communists was'; Coercive Persuasion, op. cit., p. 8
68. The Chinese communists' abandonment of formal attempts at indoctrination is also documented in the British Ministry of Defence, Treatment of British Prisoners of War in Korea (London, 1955)
69. Many of the Korean POWs believed that they had no resources to withstand communist brainwashing because they had not been drilled in a rote ideological defence of the 'American way of life'. And yet, as Biderman argues, that Americanism seemed so 'natural' to them - and therefore beyond reasoned explication - was testimony to their successful socialisation into the 'anti-ideology' of the American way. Moreover, far from McCarthyism having made ignorant Americans suggestible to communist instructors, 'ritualistic excoriations of Communism' ensured that most GIs only had to be confronted by a communist - and what they called 'all that political crap' - to decide with fervor and finality that they were not 'buying any'. This, one might suggest, was the closest the US POWs came to exhibiting any kind of Pavlovian conditioned reflex in Korea; March to Calumny, op. cit., pp. 257-261
70. Daily Cinema, 8674 (15 October 1962), p. 9
71. Mom's archetype can be found in Philip Wylie's influential 1942 volume Generation of Vipers. As Rogin elaborates, 'Mom, in Wylie's depiction was a self-righteous, hypocritical, sexually repressed, middle-aged woman ... Mom dominated her husband and encouraged the dependence of her son'. Rogin, for his part, regards momism as 'the demonic version of domestic ideology. It uncovers the buried anxieties over boundary invasion, loss of autonomy, and maternal power generated by domesticity'; Ronald Reagan, the movie, op. cit., p. 242
72. Sales data can be found in H.H. Wubben, American prisoners of war in Korea: a second look at the 'something new in history' theme, American Quarterly, 22 (i) (Spring 1970), pp. 3-19
73. Boorstin, The Image, op. cit., p. 10
74. His view is echoed in Biderman's observation of a 'widespread cloaking of animosity against Americans and things American under the rubric "anti-Communism" '; March to Calumny, op. cit., p. 125
75. A full treatment of civil defence propaganda can be found in Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War. Civil defense and American Cold War culture (Oxford, 1994)
76. Fears about the degenerate effects of living under conditions of material wealth were given some (arguably spurious) scientific status by Richter's research conducted on laboratory rats fed and pampered to excess, published in the Science Newsletter and cited by Meerloo, Mental Seduction and Menticide, op. cit., p. 278
77. However, as Biderman points out, those POWs who had 'collaborated' in the most serious ways - not least the 21 who refused repatriation - were drawn from precisely those socio-economic groups which had profited least from the post-war boom; March to Calumny, op. cit., p. 153
78. Edgar Schein, in a review of Meerloo's and Huxley's volumes, suggested that American social scientists should pay less attention to the 'brainwashing' phenomenon and more to 'the reasons why self-criticism is currently so popular'; Brainwashing and totalitarianization in modern society, World Politics, 11 (October 1958-July 1959), p. 441
79. For a British perspective on the self-critical turn, see Patrick O'Donovan, A chorus out of tune, The Observer (14 February 1960)
80. Condon made this remark in an interview with Richard Fountain, City Limits, 359 (18 August 1988), p. 22. There are some parallels: like mom, Cohn was not what he seemed. Unlike her, however, Cohn was not unmasked as a communist but, rather, the assertive homophobe - who protested being assigned a double room in Munich with colleague David Schine, with the riposte 'Hey, we're not the State Department' - was later outed as a homosexual
81. He died of AIDS in 1986; Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, op. cit., p. 44
82. In this respect, The Rack chimed with familiar concerns of 1950s cinema, for as Nora Sayre remarks 'harsh or neglectful or merely uncomprehending fathers did bulk large in the films of the Fifties', as did loneliness - a pathological condition - for which 'love began to sound medicinal'; Running Time: films of the Cold War (New York, 1982), pp. 102 and p. 127
83. Eleanor Nash, Films in Review, VII (v) (May 1956), p. 221
84. see also Sayre, Running Time, op. cit., pp. 94-98
85. As for The Manchurian Candidate's box office fortunes in 1962-1963, myth and reality again diverge. Screenplay writer, George Axelrod, has often been quoted as opining that the film 'went from failure to cult classic without ever passing through success'; Corliss, Time, op. cit., p. 84
86. John Marks, The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate' (New York, 2nd edn, 1991), p. 139
87. The controversy over MKUltra was recently reanimated with the publication of Elizabeth Nickson's barely fictional account of her mother's experiences under Cameron in The Monkey Puzzle Tree (London, 1994)
88. Conspiracy Theory (Richard Donner, Warner Bros, US, 1997)