Tinline, P. (2017) Every man has his breaking point: Reagan, brainwashing and the movies. [Video]
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Video
Every Man Has His Breaking Point_default.mp4 Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (125MB) |
Abstract
In late summer 1953, Americans were growing anxious about what had been happening to those luckless US soldiers held as POWs by North Korea. Were they being ‘brainwashed’? A reporter-turned-MGM screenwriter was dispatched to Fort Mason, San Francisco to meet the newly-released American prisoners as they finally returned home. His mission: to turn the POWs’ stories into a movie. The Pentagon assigned an ex-prisoner called Captain Robert Wise to Hollywood as Technical Adviser. The movie, Prisoner of War, was shot and cut in record time, to keep it as topical as possible. Its star, one Ronald Reagan, filmed a trailer declaring that it told the real story of the ‘brainwashing’ inflicted on the POWs. But by the time the movie opened in spring 1954, the Army had dropped it, and insisted that Captain Wise’s name be taken off the credits. Prisoner of War sank almost without trace. Why? In ‘Every Man Has His Breaking Point’: Reagan, Brainwashing and the Movies, Phil Tinline talks to historians Susan Carruthers and Charles Young, and to Captain Wise’s daughter Nancy Merkle, to find out what really happened. He pieces together accounts of North Korean re-education techniques from the POWs whose experiences informed the movie. He plays the extraordinary footage of US airmen giving coerced, false confessions of dropping germ bombs – and explores how the film-makers attempted to restage all this on screen. The film traces how Reagan’s position on whether the Korea POWs were victims or weaklings kept changing, all the way to the White House. And, Tinline asks, what might the sorry fate of Prisoner of War tell us about what ‘brainwashing’ has come to mean in America to this day?
Metadata
| Item Type: | Video |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | About the Hidden Persuaders' Documentaries: The Hidden Persuaders research group has collaborated with independent filmmakers to produce several short documentaries that are freely available to view on our website. The films investigate ideas about brainwashing and mind control both through compelling life stories and wide-ranging cultural analysis. Taken together, these documentaries illustrate the many ways in which, from the Cold War era to the present day, autonomy of mind has been threatened, or perceived to be threatened, by a range of cultural forces. |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies |
| Depositing User: | Sarah Hall |
| Date Deposited: | 01 Feb 2022 11:11 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 18:15 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/47439 |
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