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Description
This is rather remarkable, as images of full encasement and sensory deprivation go. It is a still-frame from the 1968 CBS-TV movie that served as the pilot for the highly successful series "Hawaii Five-O." The story involves a communist Chinese plot to infiltrate western intelligence by kidnapping U.S. agents and suiting them up like this before suspending them in a pool of water in a cistern that is entirely noise dampened.

For good measure, the captive's eyes, nose and ears are sealed shut with a pliant white substance. After a few hours of such total sensory deprivation, the Chinese doctor running this operation notes to his comrades that no one can last longer before his mind breaks down completely. So they drag the poor guy up out of the pool, removing his rubber hood and eye-ear-nose plugs and strapped him vertically to a board. Then the doctor questions him slyly, extracting huge amounts of top-secret information that will enable China to eventually command the Pacific theater.

Our hero, Hawaiian State Police Chief Steve McGarrett, is captured by the Chinese while investigating one of the disappearances and is given the treatment. But there's a twist, and the good guys win. For now. The series and this movie pilot, recut into two one-hour episodes that conclude Season I -- can be streamed in the U.S. on Paramount+.

Pretty heady stuff for the '60s. Only British agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) in the 1965 theatrical spy thriller "The Ipcress File" ever endured anything approaching this in the same spy-movie period. And Palmer's mental torture was a picnic in comparison. Also noteworthy is that the Chinese doctor inflicting this super-brain washing torture is played by the same actor who reprogrammed the mind of Laurence Harvey's character in 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate."

Description
This is rather remarkable, as images of full encasement and sensory deprivation go. It is a still-frame from the 1968 CBS-TV movie that served as the pilot for the highly successful series "Hawaii Five-O." The story involves a communist Chinese plot to infiltrate western intelligence by kidnapping U.S. agents and suiting them up like this before suspending them in a pool of water in a cistern that is entirely noise dampened.

For good measure, the captive's eyes, nose and ears are sealed shut with a pliant white substance. After a few hours of such total sensory deprivation, the Chinese doctor running this operation notes to his comrades that no one can last longer before his mind breaks down completely. So they drag the poor guy up out of the pool, removing his rubber hood and eye-ear-nose plugs and strapped him vertically to a board. Then the doctor questions him slyly, extracting huge amounts of top-secret information that will enable China to eventually command the Pacific theater.

Our hero, Hawaiian State Police Chief Steve McGarrett, is captured by the Chinese while investigating one of the disappearances and is given the treatment. But there's a twist, and the good guys win. For now. The series and this movie pilot, recut into two one-hour episodes that conclude Season I -- can be streamed in the U.S. on Paramount+.

Pretty heady stuff for the '60s. Only British agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) in the 1965 theatrical spy thriller "The Ipcress File" ever endured anything approaching this in the same spy-movie period. And Palmer's mental torture was a picnic in comparison. Also noteworthy is that the Chinese doctor inflicting this super-brain washing torture is played by the same actor who reprogrammed the mind of Laurence Harvey's character in 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate."