Soviets to keep their hands off the nations of this hemisphere, and ultimately the Soviets did back down. Ever since that time, there have been arguments as to precisely what happened, how these events occurred, and how close the world came to nuclear war. The filmmakers would not have known about the missile crisis when they made this film, though fortuitously the crisis occurred once the film was in release and so may have caused many people to go see it.
The background to the story includes references to the Korean War, the conflict in which the soldiers were engaged when they were captured and brainwashed. American involvement in that conflict would have been readily understood by the audience of the time, a conflict in which American troops had been sent to assist the South, a conflict that was not fully resolved then and remains a concern to this day. The Korean period is seen again and again in the dream sequence. At the beginning of the film, we see the American soldiers arrive on a mission, and we see them captured through the betrayal of their Korean guide. This sense of betrayal becomes a motif that runs through the film and that raises among the characters the sort of uncertainties and tensions that marked the cold War period in the 1950s, a period in which it was emphasized again and again that there was no way to tell friends from enemies, and enemies could be anywhere. In the film, the enemy is indeed everywhere--a houseboy with divided loyalties, a political candidate with a dual agenda, a woman bent on taking political power through her son and husband because political power at the presidential level has always been denied to women, and so on.
The dream sequence is key in creating this sense of paranoia and uncertainty. It recurs throughout the film and becomes a representation not only of what happened in Korea but of the political situation in America, where one cannot know who is real and who is an...