INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

1956 80 min

Veteran director Don Siegel called it "probably my best film," and continued to express a stubborn pride in it throughout a career that included such great films as Riot in Cell Block 11, Crime in the Streets, Baby Face Nelson, Hell is For Heroes, Madigan, Coogan's Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara, the wonderful civil war masterpiece The Beguiled, Dirty Harry, and John Wayne's great last film, The Shootist. (He was also Clint Eastwood's directing mentor and the man Eastwood credits with being his greatest inspiration as a filmmaker.)

This fifties cult classic is often cited as the best example of the triumph of a great film over a terrible title, but after all these years, who can separate the two? The title seems to be so much a part of the time period as well as the pervading paranoia that makes the film what it is (although the working title was They Came from Another World, and the alternate release title is the more poetic Sleep No More). Many have pointed to the film as a wonderful allegory for creeping Communism, others take the opposite point of view and say it's representative of the paranoid creeping McCarthyism that had swept the nation only a few years before. After all, isn't the lead actor named McCarthy? Perhaps the film works on those levels, but Siegel had something more pervasive and less specifically political in mind when he brought Jack Finney's chilling story to the screen: "I purposely had the prime spokesman for the pods be a pod psychiatrist. He speaks with authority, knowledge. He really believes that being a pod is preferable to being a frail, frightened human who cares. He has a strong case for being a pod. How marvelous it would be if you were a cow and all you had to do is munch a little grass and not worry about life, death and pain. There's a strong case for being a pod. That's why there are so many of them. The pods in my picture and in the world believe they are doing good when they convert people into pods. They get rid of pain, ill health, mental anguish. It leaves you with a dull world, but that, my dear friend, is the world in which most of us live. To not be a pod is to look for challenges and even welcome unhappiness, to affirm your existence. Existence is worthwhile as long as there is a challenge, even if you have to create that challenge. Without it you might as well not exist."

For the rest of his life, Siegel would talk disparagingly about the "pods" he would have to work with in Hollywood, and whom he would encounter in his private life. The word entered his daily speech, and came to be a curse used to describe anyone Siegel was frustrated with, anyone whose life was on automatic pilot, who did things the easy, comfortable way, or who stood in the way of progress or creativity.

According to Siegel, the special effects budget on the film was a luxurious $15,000. As is so often the case, severe limitations brought forth great creativity, and the "less is more" approach (leaving as much to the imagination as possible), the low lighting, the use of music to heighten suspense and horror, and the strong use of the kinds of camera angles and editing (as Hitchcock's Psycho would be a few years later) of the best of the one-camera television of the era all add to the effectiveness of the film.

The so-called "frame story" has always been an issue for fans of the film. We know that it was never Siegel's intention for the film to start and end with Dr. Miles Binnell (Kevin McCarthy) telling his story to the authorities. The startling last image of the film was to be Binnell at loose on the highway, pointing directly at the camera (and by extension, at us, the audience), saying, "You're next!" There were also excised scenes of the boy, Jimmy Grimaldi, watching his own pod grow, scenes that were removed after test audiences found them too gruesome. Apparently, producer Walter Wanger felt that audiences needed the frame story for more explanation, and perhaps a sense of "whew, everything will be all right!" and Siegel was faced with the ultimatum of either filming the frame himself or having it assigned to another writer and director. So, reluctantly, he caved in. Occasionally, rumors surface of a version of the film without the frame story showing up, but so far this writer has not encountered one.

Look for director Sam Peckinpah in a small cameo as the gas meter reader and ubiquitous character actors Whit Bissell and Richard Deacon as the doctors in the frame story. Screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring, who adapted Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers for the screen worked with Siegel on Baby Face Nelson, and later went on to write for the hit 60s TV series Wild, Wild West. And look for lead actor Kevin McCarthy (in the same role) in a cameo in Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake, stumbling into San Francisco, still trying to warn people about the pods!

Perhaps the overriding paranoid horror of the film is best summed up by a great critic of the genre, Carlos Clarens, who wrote in his classic book, The Illustrated History of the Horror Film: "The ultimate horror in science fiction is neither death nor destruction, but dehumanization, a state in which emotional life is suspended, in which the individual is deprived of individual feelings, free will, and moral judgment. We have come a long way from Metropolis and the encroachment of the machine. Nowadays man can become the machine himself. The automated slaves of modern times look perfectly efficient in their new painless state. From this aspect, they are like the zombies of old -- only we never bothered to wonder if the zombies were happy in their trance. The human counterfeits of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers are those we love, our family and friends. The zombies are now among us, and we cannot tell them and the girl next door apart any longer."

Come see Invasion of the Body Snatchers with us. But make sure you stay awake!

By Kenn Rabin