Cinema: Blob Psychology

The Mind Benders. "PERVERTED! SOULLESS! A LOVE AFFAIR DESTROYED BY AN EXPERIMENT SO TERRIFYING IT DEFIES HUMANITY!" Sound bloody awful? It is. And that's a shame, because it needn't have been. The plot of this British thriller has a built-in beaut of a scientific gimmick: a visual recapitulation of some eerie experiments in "sensory deprivation" conducted recently in Britain and the U.S. Object of the experiments: to find out what happens to people who for long periods forgo the use of their senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, weight and direction).

For openers, the plot presents a kindly old professor at Oxford who inexplicably accepts a bundle of boodle from the Russians and then jumps to his death from a speeding train. Was the dear old boy a traitor? Or was he a heuristic hero self-brainwashed by sensory deprivation?

To redeem the professor's reputation, a colleague (Dirk Bogarde) engages to repeat his experience. While the camera dispassionately supervises, Bogarde is led into a room impermeable to light and sound. There he is stuffed into a rubber diving suit and submerged in a tank of water warmed to body heat. His external sensations disappear, and as the hours go by he passes through six successive stages of sensory deprivation: irritation, melancholia, hallucination, panic, disorientation and stupor. When his assistants finally haul him out of the tank, Bogarde is more like a jellyfish than a human being, a mindless blob who will do anything anybody tells him to.

Unfortunately, nobody tells him to shoot the scriptwriter. Instead somebody tells him his wife (Mary Ure), who is about to present him with his fifth child, is a tart. Instantly, a competent piece of popular science dissolves into a tepid mess of sentiment, and after floating in it for an hour or more most customers will be well into the sixth stage of sensory deprivation.