Screening with post-film conversation featuring award-winning filmmaker and author Gaspar González.
A U.S. Army platoon, captured by Communists during the Korean War, is whisked to Manchuria for three nightmarish days of experimental drug-and-hypnosis-induced "brainwashing." The aftermath transforms one of the captors - decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor - into an operational assassin with a mission, and with a domineering mother who has intentions to promote her henpecked husband's political career.
Originally released during the Cuban missile crisis at the highest point of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, the film is considered one of the most sophisticated political satires ever made.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Gaspar González is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of Hammer and Nail Productions. He has written for the Miami Herald, Newsday, and Grantland, among others, and is the author of the best-selling Kindle Single The Girl in the Photo (2015) and co-author of What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (2006). In What Have They Built You to Do?—a key line of dialogue from the original film—Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González undertake an ambitious reexamination of The Manchurian Candidate. Through their multifaceted analysis of the film in all its incarnations, Jacobson and González raise provocative questions about power and anxiety in American politics and society from the Cold War to today.