An unusual combination of Cold War thriller, sci-fi and even kitchen-sink realism in this mixed-up but entertaining early 60's British film directed by Basil Dearden.
It starts off with a respectable-seeming, middle-aged scientist being arrested at a university campus. When he's on his way by train to face interrogation for betraying scientific secrets for cash, accompanied by a couple of police minders (no pun intended), he promptly commits suicide. The authorities' attention then turns to his fellow-scientist and in particular an almost literally brain-washing experiment they've concocted to reduce an individual's mental capacity so much that they can then be made to say or do anything on command, obviously something that could be more than useful in warfare.
This fellow-professor is Dirk Bogarde, handsome, admired and living a seemingly contented family life with his wife and four children, but this will all change, when to prove one way or another whether their immersive "Isolation" project was successful or not, he undertakes to go through the same guinea-pig experiment as his deceased colleague to hopefully learn conclusively whether or not the dead professor was a traitor.
When he exits his prolonged subjection to the experimental procedure, which to be fair just looks like indoor scuba-diving, he is tested by the U. K. secret service man John Clements to see if he is now open to the power of suggestion. With the assistance of an initially unwilling cohort, in the shape of Bogarde's friend and fellow scientist, Michael Bryant, incidentally a long-term admirer of Dirk's now pregnant wife, Mary Ure, Clements plants a thought in Bogarde's head that his marriage is a loveless sham.
How Bogarde eventually reacts to this precipitates a crisis in the heretofore happy union, all leading up to a dramatic conclusion where Ure's pregnancy will rather oddly play a major part in the final resolution of the piece.
Brainwashing was very much in the news at the time as Cold War spies, double agents and defections proliferated plus of course, Hollywood had already got in on the act with the classic "The Manchurian Candidate" with more to follow later in the decade on both sides of the Atlantic.
Bogarde is very good in the lead part and gets good support throughout from the rest of the cast, especially Ure as the confused but still loving wife. I'd have liked to have seen the women's parts a bit more written-up as well as a less skittish plot and anti-climactic finish, but in the end, this was another solid, low-budget feature from a British studio, well worth looking up.
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