by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The films at last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi showing (http://sdvsf.org/) were one acknowledged classic
and one movie that, though a bit below its reputation, has acquired a major
reputation far beyond that of most sci-fi/horror cheapies of the era. The
acknowledged classic was the original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, based on a novel called The
Body Snatchers published the year before by
writer Jack Finney. The film was produced by Walter Wanger at Allied Artists, nèe
Monogram, after Wanger had shot at agent
Jennings Lang because he suspected Lang of having an affair with Mrs. Wanger,
actress Joan Bennett. Wanger served a six-month sentence and when he got out
the major studios wouldn’t touch him. Because of his experience in prison he
was interested in prison as a subject for a movie, so he developed Riot
in Cell Block 11 at Allied Artists and
hired the young, edgy action specialist Don Siegel to direct. He also got a
couple of writers, Daniel Mainwaring and an uncredited Richard Collins, who’d
been blacklisted at the major studios — not for shooting anyone but for their
Left-wing politics — and four years before Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger got
brownie points from liberal Hollywood for giving Dalton Trumbo screen credit on
Spartacus and Exodus, Wanger put Mainwaring’s name on Invasion
of the Body Snatchers.
The story is
probably familiar, not only because there’ve been two formal remakes but a lot of movies since then have used the basic premise,
but just in case, here goes: Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns to his
home town of Santa Mira, California (Jack Finney was a resident of Marin County
just north of San Francisco and based “Santa Mira” on Marin County’s largest city,
San Rafael) after a trip to Reno to get a divorce. When he gets there he finds
his appointment calendar booked solid with people who insists that their family
members have been replaced by impostors who have all the right memories but
lack emotion. Miles also resumes his relationship with Becky Driscoll (Dana
Wynter), who was his high-school sweetheart until he left Santa Mira to go to
medical school, following which both married other people but have since
divorced their spouses and so they resume their old affair. Eventually, at the
home of his friend, writer Jack Belicec (King Donovan) and his wife Teddy
(Carolyn Jones, later Morticia on the original Addams Family TV show), he discovers a dead body — only it’s not
really dead: it’s a sort of first impression of Jack, lacking details like fine
facial features and fingerprints — when Miles tries to take its prints he ends
up with four solid blobs. Miles takes Becky home and finds that her father is
hiding in the basement among giant seed pods which for some mysterious reason
he’s cultivating. In the film’s most terrifying scene (and most difficult for
the actors, who had to hold still while their bodies were cast to make molds
from which their replicas could be built), Miles sees four of these seed pods open
up and reveal rough, unformed replicas of himself, Becky and the Benicecs.
Miles eventually deduces that these pods take over the bodies and souls of
their models, but can only do that when the original people fall asleep, so he
gives himself and Becky drugs to keep themselves awake and they manage to make
it through the evening.
When morning comes they find that everyone else in
Santa Mira has been turned into a pod person, courtesy of spores from outer
space that floated through the cosmos until they landed on Earth, and they are
proclaiming how wonderful their new existence is because it’s freed them from
all those pesky emotions that used to burden them and make their lives
miserable. All this is explained by the town’s psychiatrist, Dr. Danny Kauffman
(Larry Gates), who tells Miles, “Love, desire, ambition, faith — without them,
life’s so simple, believe me.” Director Siegel, who saw the movie as a
psychological rather than a political metaphor — in the early 1970’s he told
interviewer Stuart Kaminsky that “there are real people who are pods — not
vegetables from outer space, as in my movie,” and “I deliberately had the
spokesman for the pods be a pod psychiatrist.” Siegel’s reading of the film is
eloquently expressed in a speech for Kevin McCarthy in which he explains, “In
my practice, I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away.
Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn’t seem to mind... All
of us — a little bit — we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to
fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.” That
hasn’t stopped people from trying to impose political readings on the film:
some have interpreted the pods as a Cold War metaphor for the Communists,
insidiously burrowing into free societies to strip people of their ambitions
and make them all conform; while others, perhaps taking their cues from the
Left-wing politics of the screenwriter, have suggested it’s actually an
anti-McCarthyism metaphor of how the “Commie-fighters” in the government in the
1950’s tried to impose a sort of Right-wing groupthink on America. Some of the
reworkings of the Body Snatchers
premise have indeed used it for outspoken political purposes — Right-wing ones
in Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World (1958) and Left-wing ones in John Carpenter’s marvelous (and woefully
underrated) They Live (1991).
Anyway, Miles and Becky realize that everyone else in town has been taken over
— including a smarmy-voiced phone operator who won’t let them call out of the
city — and they flee, first in a car and then on foot after they realize the
police (who are pods) have been alerted to arrest them on any pretext and hold
them until they can be pod-ized. They hide out in a disused coal mine but Becky
nods off just long enough to get transformed, and one of the scenes Siegel was
proudest of was the one in which Miles kisses her “in a delicious, non-pod way”
and her unresponsiveness makes him realize she’s now a pod. Miles flees to a
freeway and tries to get the passing cars to stop for him so he can get to
authorities in a town that hasn’t yet been taken over, but no one believes him
and he’s reduced to a screaming figure yelling at everyone, “You’re next!
You’re next! YOU’RE NEXT!” Siegel
wanted to end the film with Miles yelling “You’re next!” at the camera, but
Wanger and his bosses at Allied Artists wanted a more optimistic ending, so
they had him shoot framing sequences at the beginning and the end in which
Miles is apprehended by authorities and examined by a psychiatrist, Dr. Harvey
Bassett (Richard Deacon, later Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show), to whom he tells the story in a voice-over
flashback that’s one of the elements, like the darkly lit and obliquely angled
cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks (though the screening proprietor,
himself a cinematographer, thought the camerawork and lighting were “lazy”
because almost all of it came from overhead) and the overall mood of the story
(a paranoid fantasy come true), marks this as the first science-fiction film
noir (26 years before Blade
Runner, which usually gets that title). As
the film returns to the “Emergency Hospital” where the opening frame took
place, the authorities who were ready to take Miles into custody suddenly
receive word that a truck has crashed into a bus on the highway, and the truck
was full of seed pods — thereby establishing Miles’ credibility, confirming his
story and leading the cops to notify the FBI and seal off Santa Mira from the
rest of the world.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is number five on my list of the five greatest
science-fiction films of all time — the others, in order, are 2001: A
Space Odyssey, Solaris (Tarkovsky’s, not Soderbergh’s!), Metropolis, and Robert Wise’s original The Day the
Earth Stood Still — and though I hadn’t
seen it in a while it held up quite beautifully. Ironically, Kevin McCarthy was
a good friend of Montgomery Clift but was jealous because while Clift was at
MGM shooting a prestige big-budget historical extravaganza, Raintree
County, with Elizabeth Taylor as his
co-star, McCarthy was making this “B”-budgeted science-fiction movie at a cheap
studio. Little did either of them know that eventually Raintree
County would be virtually forgotten and Invasion
of the Body Snatchers would be acknowledged
as a classic! Invasion of the Body Snatchers was not
the first science-fiction movie in which aliens from outer space take over
human bodies and turn them into obedient mind slaves — William Cameron Menzies’
Invasion from Mars (1953) did
that not only before this movie but also before Jack Finney published his novel
in 1955 — but it’s quite the best (rivaled only by Carpenter’s They
Live, which as I’ve written before in these
pages got more out of the central premise of The Matrix in one 105-minute movie than the Wachowski siblings
were able to get in three 135-minute movies), a vividly dramatized and realized
paranoid fantasy whose sheer relentlessness (apparently the original cut
included some humorous elements but the “suits” at Allied Artists ordered them
taken out, and for once the studio “suits” were right) makes it one of the most
memorable and powerful films of all time.
