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→The Manchurian Candidate
But the film also suggests that any such conditioning might unravel under a stress that proves too great for the conditioning to override. In the film, the hypnotized assassin shoots and kills his father-in-law, and then shoots the wife he had married only days before. The simple shock of that loss causes him to remember at least bits and pieces of the truth, though only in strange and frightening dreams. More to the point, his former commanding officer and another surviving ex-prisoner start to remember the truth in ''their'' dreams—because the enemy psychiatrists had perhaps neglected the conditioning of the survivors, or perhaps simply overestimated the power of their own technique. The former officer is then able to override the conditioning and learn the full particulars.
But the film also suggests that any such conditioning might unravel under a stress that proves too great for the conditioning to override. In the film, the hypnotized assassin shoots and kills his father-in-law, and then shoots the wife he had married only days before. The simple shock of that loss causes him to remember at least bits and pieces of the truth, though only in strange and frightening dreams. More to the point, his former commanding officer and another surviving ex-prisoner start to remember the truth in ''their'' dreams—because the enemy psychiatrists had perhaps neglected the conditioning of the survivors, or perhaps simply overestimated the power of their own technique. The former officer is then able to override the conditioning and learn the full particulars.
The shortcomings depicted in that film are consistent with the realization that the CIA eventually found themselves unable to develop a reliable technique for interrogation under hypnosis.
In short, the [[Communist]] psychiatrists depicted in this film make three key mistakes, all of which contribute to the failure of their plan:
# They hypnotize the subject's fellow prisoners to say nice things about him, but never bother to hypnotize the subject to "remember" that those same people considered him a friend.
# They never follow up on the conditioning of the other prisoners, with the result that those prisoners begin to remember, at first only in their dreams, a real sequence of events vastly and critically different from the sequence that they were ordered to "remember."
# The American operator gives the subject an assignment that involves killing someone he loves. That stress finally causes his own conditioning to break down and prompts him to turn for help to his former commanding officer, who by now knows the truth.
The shortcomings depicted in that film are consistent with the realization that the CIA eventually found themselves unable to develop a reliable technique for interrogation under hypnosis. To date the records of the [[United States Army]], and those of the other armed services, contain no known instance of a former prisoner of war who carried out an act of war against the United States upon a command given as a post-hypnotic suggestion.
=== The Family Man ===
=== The Family Man ===