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Reviews
Time Limit (1957)
Time Limit
An interesting new site has declassified information on blackmail and Korean POWs and discusses this film: http://www.koreanconfidential.com/koreanpowfilmnoir.html
Director John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate was the best but not the first to explore the issue of U.S. POWs in the 1950-3 Korean War. During the war, Americans had been stunned when many U.S. prisoners collaborated with their communist captors; issued false confessions to germ warfare; and even, in 21 cases, chose to stay behind in China rather than return home. What happened during the war and when the prisoners returned inspired its own sub-genre of Cold War Noir. How realistic were The Manchurian Candidate and these other firms -- and today's hit show Homeland? Click the poster to the right to find out.
Check out some of the best, or at least most interesting, Korean War POW movies below. Click on the posters below for more info and view the trailers (you need flash).
Don't miss the Bill Dumas documentary on unreturned Korean War POWs.
And for perhaps the best actors in Korean War POW movies, see the bottom of this page.
One last thing: if you like modern espionage and spy movies, see the films Shiri and JSA in the left column. ...intense noirish thrillers from the new wave of Korean film.
The Fearmakers (1958)
The Fearmakers
Some interested declassified history and commentary about the Fearmakers: http://www.koreanconfidential.com/koreanpowfilmnoir.html
Director John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate was the best but not the first to explore the issue of U.S. POWs in the 1950-3 Korean War. During the war, Americans had been stunned when many U.S. prisoners collaborated with their communist captors; issued false confessions to germ warfare; and even, in 21 cases, chose to stay behind in China rather than return home. What happened during the war and when the prisoners returned inspired its own sub-genre of Cold War Noir. How realistic were The Manchurian Candidate and these other firms -- and today's hit show Homeland? Click the poster to the right to find out.
Check out some of the best, or at least most interesting, Korean War POW movies below. Click on the posters below for more info and view the trailers (you need flash).
Don't miss the Bill Dumas documentary on unreturned Korean War POWs.
And for perhaps the best actors in Korean War POW movies, see the bottom of this page.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Manchurian Candidate
It turns out China really did send back "Manchurian Candidates" after the Korean War, but a less sophisticated kind than in the movie:
http://www.koreanconfidential.com/manchuriancandidatesreport.html
KorCon recently told you about a Top Secret program to monitor, and sometimes hold back, pro-communist letters from US POWs in Korea. U.S. intelligence secretly opened letters sent by U.S. POWs to their families. If the letters contained communist propaganda or suspected secret messages, they were not delivered.
We ran across an interesting twist in those previously classified Pentagon records, which show the letter-opening project ran into at least one delicate situation. When intelligence officials opened two letters from a U.S. prisoner, they found that one was a letter to the man's wife and the second was a suggestive message to another women. But the letters had been put into the wrong envelopes.
The intelligence officials didn't know whether the man had goofed or the communists were testing to see whether the mail was opened in the U.S. It's unclear whether the Pentagon sent the letters to their proper reciepients, or, more likely, kept their operation secret by allowing the embarrassing mistake to occur, leaving the prisoner with some tough questions to answer when he returned home.
The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
Manchurian Candidate 2004
This version of the movies is a bridge to the show "Homeland"-some interesting real-life history about both of them at
http://www.koreanconfidential.com/manchuriancandidatesreport.html
This version of the movies is a bridge to the show "Homeland"-some interesting real-life history about both of them at
http://www.koreanconfidential.com/manchuriancandidatesreport.html
This version of the movies is a bridge to the show "Homeland"-some interesting real-life history about both of them at
http://www.koreanconfidential.com/manchuriancandidatesreport.html
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