To be honest, I didn't think The Mind Benders (1963) would be very good; I just thought it would have Dirk Bogarde in it. I was half right. Written by James Kennaway from his novel of the same name and produced and directed by Michael Relph and Basil Dearden in a speculative extension of their social problem cycle, the film opens like a spy thriller and closes like a parable and moves in the meantime through romantic drama, psychological horror, and science that would be more comfortable as fiction, rather as befits a story about the destabilization of personalities and the unacknowledged multitudes we contain. Of all the things it is, none of them are shlock.
The sign on the side of the shedlike research laboratory at Oxford reads "Isolation," but the modern viewer will recognize the stuff of its experiments as sensory deprivation, the kind which starts with frogman immersion in a float tank and ends with disorientation, hallucinations, and ultimately, if the subject is kept long enough in the weightless, silent, drifting, lonely dark, what Dr. Henry Longman (Bogarde) is quite sure would be "a sort of soulless, mindless, will-less thing . . . a kind of sea anemone." He speaks from grimly self-mocking experience, having bottled out of his scientific responsibilities six weeks ago to bury himself in the escapism of family life and a second honeymoon with his beloved wife Oonagh (Mary Ure) while his colleague Professor Sharpey (Harold Goldblatt) went on with his pet project alone, at least until the old man threw himself from a train with a thousand pounds of foreign interest in his briefcase. There's nothing strange in scientists who sell out their countries, but even to a man as professionally cynical as Major Hall of MI5 (John Clements) there is something weird in the fingersnap conversion of a ban-the-bomb boffin into a paid-off traitor and the answer seems to lie in the bleak metallic ripple of the isolation tank. His interview with Longman is a masterclass of impassivity, stonewalling off the nervy scientist's impassioned defense of his colleague until, as he has been trying to pretend wasn't inevitable from the moment his friend and fellow researcher Dr. Tate (Michael Bryant) showed him the notice of Sharpey's death in the paper and let him know that a certain Major had been asking for him, Longman consents to return to the lab and endure the kind of open-ended isolation that should file the case of Sharpey once and for all under the heading of "Z for zombie and not T for traitor." What he does not consent to is to be zombified himself, eight hours into the experiment when his boredom, irritation, confusion, arousal, weeping, screaming, and delirium have given way to a disintegration that the Major recognizes with chilling expertise: "It's fantastic! It'd take months of solitary confinement to reduce a man to this state, even if he were kept awake half the time with lights and all the rest of it. You've come into my country, don't you see . . . You could persuade Longman into anything now." Gentlemanly as an Avenger with his three-piece suit and his umbrella, Hall is Doctor as well as Major; he's the man from MKUltra. The true test of brainwashing is the depth of the affected belief. With Sharpey, it was his unworldly and indisputable patriotism. With Longman, it's Oonagh. Through twelve years and four children, he's loved her without reserve or second thoughts, and now with the help of a reluctant but complicit Tate, Hall is going to convince him otherwise. "Strictly Frankenstein country," Longman observed of the hollow, low-lit hangar of the tank as he laid out the parameters of the experiment with mock-military crispness—before bolting out of the room to be sick—"and this happens to be fact." It is rather like watching a monster assembled as the sodden Longman sways under the lights between the bad cop of Hall and the good cop of Tate and the cross-talk of their poison-dripping that will turn the next six months into a nightmare of alienation and cruelty. And what did you do in the Cold War, Daddy?
All of these elements make for perfectly cromulent spy-fi, albeit more in the line of John le Carré than The Manchurian Candidate (1962). It's disturbing enough to contemplate foreign powers infiltrating the hearts and minds of our brave boys of the West; it's far more sinister to watch that infiltration being practiced and refined beneath the dreaming spires of the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Nothing in Major Hall's "whole chilly paraphernalia of treason" is colder than this concentrated act of betrayal, a terrified and trusting man eviscerated of the core of his life by the very people he made promise to return him safely to it, a woman in the tender dusk of a trysting place whispering suddenly to the emptiness behind her husband's eyes, "For God's sake, where are you?" But even the human cost of spycraft is less the theme of The Mind Benders than it is a jumping-off point for an exploration of what a once bright-eyed Sharpey called, in the 16 mm research film that served as our endearingly amateurish infodump on isolation, "the physics of the soul," and if we like to think of those equations as warm ones, they can also be damn near absolute zero. By the end of the film, we have been inescapably reminded that a person doesn't need to be brainwashed to act out of accustomed character or make decisions in ignorance of the reasons. They only need to be human.
( What the hell have you made me do? )
I can't watch it very often, but I have admired Kennaway's debut novel-to-film Tunes of Glory (1960) for years; it's patterned so beautifully against itself. The Mind Benders is either more experimentally structured or just slightly untidy, but its script is so intensely intelligent that I don't care if its sudden gear-shifts are really a flaw. I love its handling of characters like Oonagh, who could so easily have been an object and has odd currents of her own, or the leopard-printed college widow Annabelle (Wendy Craig), who lives on the barge next to Tate's and is said to be "part of a gentleman's education—Eton, Oxford, and Annabelle" and is absolutely not up for having an affair with Longman because drunken midlife crises are one thing, but brainwashing is out of her emotional pay grade. I love that the moment of truth in this movie is actually a long, sweaty, touch-and-go night of the sort that might bond even strangers to one another until it means everything for one person to ask, "Are you the doctor?" and the other to answer, "Well, if I am, there's going to be one hell of a scandal because I'm going to be struck off all the lists." I enjoy the pains taken to treat a subject as topically sensational as brainwashing in terms of serious science, not paranoid fantasy: nobody can smash the links with a deck of red queens. This film still looks to me on some level like the direct precursor of much less grounded takes like Simon (1980) and Altered States (1980). The opening titles claim it was "suggested by experiments on 'The Reduction of Sensation' recently carried out at certain Universities in the United States," which makes me wonder if the university where my grandfather taught psychology was one of them. My mother was taking part in perceptual experiments around the same time. I don't know if any of them made the world look as volatile in black-and-white as the photography by Denys Coop, where campus tours can give way to shadows as double-edged as unexamined desires. Norman Bird turns up for a couple of seconds as a cabbie, Roger Delgado as an Arctic scientist, and an uncredited Edward Fox as a nosy student. I suppose if I want to see more of Michael Bryant, I should finally get around to watching The Stone Tape (1972). I really need to remember that the quality of films with Dirk Bogarde in them cannot be accurately estimated from their titles. This country brought to you by my motivated backers at Patreon.
The sign on the side of the shedlike research laboratory at Oxford reads "Isolation," but the modern viewer will recognize the stuff of its experiments as sensory deprivation, the kind which starts with frogman immersion in a float tank and ends with disorientation, hallucinations, and ultimately, if the subject is kept long enough in the weightless, silent, drifting, lonely dark, what Dr. Henry Longman (Bogarde) is quite sure would be "a sort of soulless, mindless, will-less thing . . . a kind of sea anemone." He speaks from grimly self-mocking experience, having bottled out of his scientific responsibilities six weeks ago to bury himself in the escapism of family life and a second honeymoon with his beloved wife Oonagh (Mary Ure) while his colleague Professor Sharpey (Harold Goldblatt) went on with his pet project alone, at least until the old man threw himself from a train with a thousand pounds of foreign interest in his briefcase. There's nothing strange in scientists who sell out their countries, but even to a man as professionally cynical as Major Hall of MI5 (John Clements) there is something weird in the fingersnap conversion of a ban-the-bomb boffin into a paid-off traitor and the answer seems to lie in the bleak metallic ripple of the isolation tank. His interview with Longman is a masterclass of impassivity, stonewalling off the nervy scientist's impassioned defense of his colleague until, as he has been trying to pretend wasn't inevitable from the moment his friend and fellow researcher Dr. Tate (Michael Bryant) showed him the notice of Sharpey's death in the paper and let him know that a certain Major had been asking for him, Longman consents to return to the lab and endure the kind of open-ended isolation that should file the case of Sharpey once and for all under the heading of "Z for zombie and not T for traitor." What he does not consent to is to be zombified himself, eight hours into the experiment when his boredom, irritation, confusion, arousal, weeping, screaming, and delirium have given way to a disintegration that the Major recognizes with chilling expertise: "It's fantastic! It'd take months of solitary confinement to reduce a man to this state, even if he were kept awake half the time with lights and all the rest of it. You've come into my country, don't you see . . . You could persuade Longman into anything now." Gentlemanly as an Avenger with his three-piece suit and his umbrella, Hall is Doctor as well as Major; he's the man from MKUltra. The true test of brainwashing is the depth of the affected belief. With Sharpey, it was his unworldly and indisputable patriotism. With Longman, it's Oonagh. Through twelve years and four children, he's loved her without reserve or second thoughts, and now with the help of a reluctant but complicit Tate, Hall is going to convince him otherwise. "Strictly Frankenstein country," Longman observed of the hollow, low-lit hangar of the tank as he laid out the parameters of the experiment with mock-military crispness—before bolting out of the room to be sick—"and this happens to be fact." It is rather like watching a monster assembled as the sodden Longman sways under the lights between the bad cop of Hall and the good cop of Tate and the cross-talk of their poison-dripping that will turn the next six months into a nightmare of alienation and cruelty. And what did you do in the Cold War, Daddy?
All of these elements make for perfectly cromulent spy-fi, albeit more in the line of John le Carré than The Manchurian Candidate (1962). It's disturbing enough to contemplate foreign powers infiltrating the hearts and minds of our brave boys of the West; it's far more sinister to watch that infiltration being practiced and refined beneath the dreaming spires of the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Nothing in Major Hall's "whole chilly paraphernalia of treason" is colder than this concentrated act of betrayal, a terrified and trusting man eviscerated of the core of his life by the very people he made promise to return him safely to it, a woman in the tender dusk of a trysting place whispering suddenly to the emptiness behind her husband's eyes, "For God's sake, where are you?" But even the human cost of spycraft is less the theme of The Mind Benders than it is a jumping-off point for an exploration of what a once bright-eyed Sharpey called, in the 16 mm research film that served as our endearingly amateurish infodump on isolation, "the physics of the soul," and if we like to think of those equations as warm ones, they can also be damn near absolute zero. By the end of the film, we have been inescapably reminded that a person doesn't need to be brainwashed to act out of accustomed character or make decisions in ignorance of the reasons. They only need to be human.
( What the hell have you made me do? )
I can't watch it very often, but I have admired Kennaway's debut novel-to-film Tunes of Glory (1960) for years; it's patterned so beautifully against itself. The Mind Benders is either more experimentally structured or just slightly untidy, but its script is so intensely intelligent that I don't care if its sudden gear-shifts are really a flaw. I love its handling of characters like Oonagh, who could so easily have been an object and has odd currents of her own, or the leopard-printed college widow Annabelle (Wendy Craig), who lives on the barge next to Tate's and is said to be "part of a gentleman's education—Eton, Oxford, and Annabelle" and is absolutely not up for having an affair with Longman because drunken midlife crises are one thing, but brainwashing is out of her emotional pay grade. I love that the moment of truth in this movie is actually a long, sweaty, touch-and-go night of the sort that might bond even strangers to one another until it means everything for one person to ask, "Are you the doctor?" and the other to answer, "Well, if I am, there's going to be one hell of a scandal because I'm going to be struck off all the lists." I enjoy the pains taken to treat a subject as topically sensational as brainwashing in terms of serious science, not paranoid fantasy: nobody can smash the links with a deck of red queens. This film still looks to me on some level like the direct precursor of much less grounded takes like Simon (1980) and Altered States (1980). The opening titles claim it was "suggested by experiments on 'The Reduction of Sensation' recently carried out at certain Universities in the United States," which makes me wonder if the university where my grandfather taught psychology was one of them. My mother was taking part in perceptual experiments around the same time. I don't know if any of them made the world look as volatile in black-and-white as the photography by Denys Coop, where campus tours can give way to shadows as double-edged as unexamined desires. Norman Bird turns up for a couple of seconds as a cabbie, Roger Delgado as an Arctic scientist, and an uncredited Edward Fox as a nosy student. I suppose if I want to see more of Michael Bryant, I should finally get around to watching The Stone Tape (1972). I really need to remember that the quality of films with Dirk Bogarde in them cannot be accurately estimated from their titles. This country brought to you by my motivated backers at Patreon.
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