For February, with the noise of Oscar season reaching its zenith, I’m going to be churlish and recommend a movie that didn’t receive a single nomination, from anyone, anywhere…
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
running time: 1h., 20m. / original studio: Allied Artists
directed by Don Siegel; screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring, from Collier’s Magazine serial The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney; director of photography, Ellsworth Fredericks; edited by Robert S. Eisen; music by Carmen Dragonwith: Kevin McCarthy (Dr. Miles Bennell), Dana Wynter (Becky Driscoll), Larry Gates (Dr. Dan Kauffman), King Donovan (Jack Bellicec), Carolyn Jones (Teddy Bellicec)
“People are pods. Many of my associates are certainly pods…To be a pod means that you have no passion, no anger, the spark has left you…of course, there’s a very strong case for being a pod…It happens to leave you in a very dull world but that, by the way, is the world that most of us live in.” — director Don Siegel
“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!” — Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Miles Bennell
There isn’t a wasted moment in one of my all-time favorite movies, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a nightmarish little masterpiece that tapped into and articulated the general unease which crept across America as the Cold War took shape. It has often been misread as an allegory for conservative paranoia over the spread of Communism, but Invasion is a much smarter movie than that — much smarter. A science fiction thriller about dehumanization and denial in a century of monstrous crimes, Invasion of the Body Snatchers can support multiple interpretations, including the opposite view that it is a pointed critique of McCarthyism. As the Saturday Night Live joke used to go, “It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!” It’s a right-wing fantasy, it’s a left-wing fantasy, it’s neither and both, a fever dream of America in troubled times, made right in the center of those troubled times.
The plot of Invasion is practically American folklore by now, although thankfully its characters don’t know that: Dr. Miles Bennell returns early from a convention to his hometown of Santa Mira because many of his patients have been asking for him. People he’s known all his life have suddenly become convinced that their family members are imposters, and despite every bromide that Miles can fabricate out of his own scientific prejudices, nothing convinces them otherwise. And then, twenty-four hours later everything is fine, as if all they had to do was sleep on it and wake up cured.
And that is exactly how the genuinely creepy invaders of this film have taken over — not with spectacular war machines destroying American landmarks willy-nilly, but through seed pods from space that silently, peacefully, steal our bodies and minds while we’re sleeping. The only thing wrong with the pods’ otherwise perfect replication of human beings is their placidity, their self-satisfied lack of compassion. As a matter of fact, if you want to get the pod people really stirred up, just show some emotion and you’ll have a whole town full of them after you.
Shot in twenty-three days for just half a million dollars, Invasion is an exemplar of low budget storytelling, unfolding tersely, using up just enough running time to introduce Miles, the townspeople, and a hint of romance with his old flame Becky Driscoll, and then the bottom drops out and the film slides headlong toward chaos without a pause. Its dreadful premise is not the mere threat of an impending takeover by inhuman creatures but the slow, horrific dawning that, as Miles screams at the finale, they’re here already, dim bulb. The invasion is over, and there’s no one left except you.
The argument that Invasion is paranoid, anti-Red propaganda hinges on the idea that a Communist takeover of America would be just this sort of insidious, quiet invasion: nothing would seem to be going wrong on the surface, and then one day you would just wake up without your capitalist soul. Like a McCarthyite’s fantasy of life in a Commie world, the film’s pod people have a regimented, unquestioning society, illustrated in one of the film’s most disturbing scenes: Miles and Becky watching in disbelief as their former friends and neighbors gather in the Santa Mira town square, casually lining up behind trucks filled with fresh pods, receiving orders to distribute the things in an ever widening circle outside the city limits.
Actual pod philosophy, however, contradicts the whole Red Scare reading. As Dr. Kauffman, Miles’ pleasant, disarming colleague, sums it up: “Now just think, less than a month ago Santa Mira was like any other town. People with nothing but problems. Then out of the sky came a solution…There’s no pain. Suddenly while you’re asleep, (the pods will) absorb your minds. Your memories. And you’re reborn into an untroubled world.”
An untroubled world: Kauffman speaks in the reasonable and soothing tones of an appliance salesman, or a Midwestern minister. It’s the language of advertising, not the Comintern, it’s the constant, gentle prodding from the consumer society telling you to buy off your discomfort, remake yourself without effort, and don’t worry, be happy. Later, as Miles eavesdrops on his secretary’s living room, looking for a friend, any friend, he overhears her giving orders to place a pod in her own baby’s crib, “and then there’ll be no more tears.”
This movie is paranoid, all right: it’s deathly afraid we’ll finally find that all-purpose, single-dose sedative for which Americans have always yearned, the one that will permanently kill the pain of doubt, suffering, and empathy with others. The pod people have absolutely no interest in overturning the status quo; they’re all about keeping things exactly as they’ve always been, only without the cognitive dissonance that should be every person’s birthright in the age of nuclear weapons and state sponsored genocide.
* * *
Invasion of the Body Snatchers opens with a distinct film noir atmosphere, capturing real locations with high contrast photography, the shadows deepening with the first nightfall (the whole film takes place over a manic two-and-a-half days). But as the mystery of what is happening to Santa Mira starts coming to the surface, Siegel effortlessly switches over to film noir’s stylistic grandfather German Expressionism, with its skewed angles and distorted perspectives, giving the film a lasting tinge of madness. Prior to this movie, Siegel’s forte had always been keeping it simple on a tight budget and here he outdid himself, making cheap special effects work by using them creatively and sparingly, and applying basic film craft — expressive lighting, clever editing, great character faces — to make one of the best films of the 1950s from any genre.
Of course, since it was the fifties and the film was science fiction, Invasion wasn’t reviewed by a single major critic of the day. Siegel tried, knowing he had made the best film of his career so far, by arranging free screenings for the press but he was conspicuously ignored. No self-respecting critic of the day would stoop to reviewing a small indie film about something that could never happen. Even so, Invasion did modestly well at the box office, turning a profit for the studio because, as often happens, the much-maligned audience was a step ahead of both critics and exhibitors.
But Invasion made its real impact later, after French cineastes discovered Don Siegel and started calling him an auteur, and then Allied Artists started leasing its catalogue to television stations, where the film played late shows after the local news. That was how I first saw it, as an eleven-year-old of the sixties, sitting on the floor in front of the TV after the rest of the family was in bed. Already an aficionado of weird and fantastic cinema, I thought it had some really good, exciting scenes, though it didn’t particularly scare me.
Actually, Invasion scares me a lot more now. I was a sophisticated viewer then, but not so much that I understood things like political witch hunts and the ever-lurking madness of crowds, or that the Everyday world sometimes harbors a fascist element (it’s called conformity), or that there is a struggle to keep your humanity as you get older, when a long memory becomes entangled with betrayed ideals, betrayed relationships, and an historical awareness of what can happen when fear takes over a society. These are the things going bump in the suburban night of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which is more akin to a ghost story for adults than it is a straight horror movie. If it is allegorical, then its true subject is the anxiety felt by an overworked culture that never gets enough sleep, and that consequently feels a slow draining of hope and love from the world.
Though Invasion has been remade twice, first by Philip (The Right Stuff) Kaufman in 1978, and then by Abel (Bad Lieutenant) Ferrara in 1994, both films in color, both with bigger budgets and marquee names, neither version comes close to the sense of mounting hysteria Siegel’s film achieves in just eighty minutes. The remakes are exercises in belaboring the point, and the well-known Hollywood tendency to carelessly screw around with what was done right the first time. The original remains the gold standard of fifties science fiction cinema because, moment-by-moment, it projects an earned awareness of the violation we feel when our house — or our worldview — has been robbed.
Invasion isn’t a perfect movie, but I think the imperfections only add to its glory as the consummate low budget chiller. The music by Carmen Dragon (yes, a real person’s name) is of a style that has gone out of fashion, overbearing and jarring, but it keeps viewers’ attention where it belongs. This isn’t a film to relax with: Remember what happens to those who fall asleep. And the framing device, in which a crazed Miles tells his story to a skeptical psychiatrist, is a famous example of a studio imposing a so-called happy ending where it wasn’t needed, but in the end it fails to dilute what has gone before. Siegel was forced to come back to the film and add it on, seven months after production had wrapped, yet he devised a brilliant little set piece which harkens back to the first great work of film Expressionism, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). In that movie, too, a madman tells the tale, only the twist at the end is, well, he’s a madman. The final twist of Siegel’s film inverts the Caligari effect: Miles is certainly raving, but he has good reason.
Invasion has sometimes been shown in a “Director’s Cut,” without the framing story and shortened by four minutes, but the truth is, nothing could soften the impact of Miles’ journey from complacent, small town doctor to terrified, hunted man. This was a common side effect of both Noir and Expressionist styles: they take us so deeply into the shadows of a movie’s world that no happy-fied finale, however well-crafted, can cover the taste of dark truth, or pure fear, or pitiless Fate, which has formed the center of the film (for instance, It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946).
Very well acted by an ensemble of working professionals, many of whom will be familiar to fans of Nick-at-Nite. Great moments to look forward to: the body on the pool table awakening; the pods in the greenhouse, stealing identities during a dinner party; Miles and Becky fleeing Santa Mira with sirens blaring and the whole town on their heels; and that final, blood-curdling kiss.
NOTES:
Released 49 years ago this month, in February 1956.
Selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1994.
DID McCARTHY GET THE PART BECAUSE OF HIS NAME?: the film’s star Kevin McCarthy (b. 1914) is the younger brother of novelist Mary McCarthy (The Group) and the cousin of former Democratic Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. He made his film debut in 1944 and has more than fifty films and forty television shows to his credit, including a winking appearance in the ’70s remake of Invasion. Still acting at the age of 91, he has toured the U.S. for the last 20 years in Give ‘Em Hell, Harry, the one-character play about Harry Truman.
THE WRITERS: novelist Jack Finney (1911-1995) worked in several genres besides science fiction, including mysteries and literary fiction. The Body Snatchers is one of his more unsettling efforts. Finney scoffed at the idea that social conformity was its real subject, but there is little doubt he was dealing with the loss of compassion in uncertain times, and the human tendency to escape into utopian solutions, a frequent theme in his work.
The film version’s decidedly noir edge comes from adapter Daniel Mainwaring (1902-1977). An unusual screenwriter for any era, he managed to work steadily and without a break for almost thirty years in the movie business. He also had time to be a pulp novelist, writing Build My Gallows High under a pseudonym and then adapting it for the screen himself, where it became Out of the Past (1947), one of the essential films noir.
The great writer-director Sam Peckinpah (1925-1984), notoriously difficult to get along with, later claimed that he was the person responsible for the quality of the Invasion script, often telling interviewers that he’d done a complete, uncredited rewrite on location. He may have touched up a few scenes during the shoot, and he did win himself a walk-on role as a meter reader in Miles’ basement, but the verifiable facts are that Daniel Mainwaring finally complained to the Writers Guild, and they told Peckinpah to put a lid on it. Apparently, creating an American classic, The Wild Bunch (1969), wasn’t good enough for him.
SLUMMING, AND HAPPILY: Like several other B-moviemakers of the fifties, Don Siegel (1912-1991) had a more distinguished background than he admitted to, studying at Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in England. He began as a second unit director and editor for Warner Brothers in the thirties and forties, then directed many potboilers of the fifties with imaginative style and speed. Especially notable for the quip, “If you shake a movie, ten minutes will fall out,” he received due recognition in the U.S. rather late in his career, after making Clint Eastwood into a superstar with the challenging Dirty Harry (1971). Eastwood has often credited Siegel as his mentor, both as an actor and director.
Siegel’s work sometimes appears ideologically motivated, but only if you’re looking for it; he cannot be pinned down to left or right. Other worthwhile films by this secretly thoughtful craftsman: Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), The Killers (1964), The Beguiled (1971), Charley Varrick (1973), The Shootist (1976).
THE DVD: Artisan Entertainment released an excellent widescreen transfer of Invasion in 1998, at the dawn of the DVD revolution. It still works fine. There are no extras to speak of, but they’re not missed; the movie’s the thing, and no-extras also means very affordable ($10 at DVD Planet).
If you’ve only seen the pan-and-scan version on the late show, you’ll be blown away by cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks’ fantastic compositions. Though the original film was cropped for a 2:1 widescreen back in ’56, it’s still like getting an all new movie. The pan-and-scan versions (sometimes called Full Screen) have been made from that same cropped image, which is why they’re always grainy and slightly out of focus.
Eric Barker is an independent filmmaker and writer living in Denver.
Barker’s Classic Movies #1 was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
