Invasion of the Body Snatchers
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| Invasion of the Body Snatchers | |
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| Directed by | Don Siegel[1] |
| Produced by | Walter Wanger |
| Written by | Novel: Jack Finney Screenplay: Daniel Mainwaring Uncredited: Richard Collins |
| Starring | Kevin McCarthy Dana Wynter King Donovan Carolyn Jones Larry Gates |
| Distributed by | Allied Artists Pictures Corporation |
| Release date(s) | February 5, 1956[1] |
| Running time | 80 min. |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $417,000 |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 science fiction film.[1] It stars Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones and is based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (originally serialized in Colliers Magazine in 1954). A somewhat similar plot appeared in the 1958 film, I Married a Monster from Outer Space.
In 1994, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The screenplay was adapted from Finney's novel by Daniel Mainwaring (who also wrote the film noir classic Out of the Past), along with an uncredited Richard Collins. It was directed by Don Siegel, who went on to make The Killers and Dirty Harry.
The film has been remade three times.
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[edit] Plot
Set in the fictional town of Santa Mira, California (actually shot in Sierra Madre), the plot centers on Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), a local doctor, who finds a rash of patients accusing their loved ones of being impostors. Another patient is a former sweetheart of his; recent divorcee Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), who tells him that her cousin, Wilma, has this same strange fear about Uncle Ira.
Assured at first by the town psychiatrist Dr. Dan Kaufman (Larry Gates), that the cases are nothing but "epidemic mass hysteria," Bennell soon discovers, with the help of his friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan), that the townspeople are in fact being replaced by simulations grown from plantlike pods; perfect physical duplicates who kill and dispose of their human victims. The Pod People are indistinguishable from normal people, except for their utter lack of emotion. The pod people work together to secretly spread more pods—which grew from "seeds drifting through space for years"—in order to replace the entire human race.
The film climaxes with Bennell and Driscoll attempting to escape the pod people, intending to warn the rest of humanity. They hide; Driscoll falls asleep and is subverted. With the pod people close behind, a seemingly crazed Bennell runs onto the highway frantically screaming of the alien force which has overrun Santa Mira to the passing motorists and (in a moment that could almost be considered a breaking of the 4th wall) looks into the camera and yells, "They're here already! You're next!"
[edit] Original intended ending
The film was originally intended[2] to end with Bennell screaming hysterically as truckloads of pods pass him by but the studio, wary of such a pessimistic conclusion, insisted on adding a prologue and epilogue to the movie that suggested a more optimistic outcome to the story. In this version the movie begins with Bennell about to be sent to an insane asylum. He then tells the police his story in a flashback. In the closing scene, pods are discovered at a highway accident, thus confirming his warning. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is notified, though it is left ambiguous whether they intervene in time to save the Earth. These scenes were deleted in a 1979 re-release after the first remake appeared, paring the movie down to 76 minutes.
[edit] Themes
The film has been read as both an allegory for the perceived loss of personal autonomy in the Soviet Union and as an indictment of McCarthyist paranoia about Communism during the early stages of the Cold War. as Adam Roberts wrote in Science Fiction; The New Critical Idiom:
Indeed [the film] can be read both as right-wing McCarthyite scaremongering—Communists from an Alien place are infiltrating our American towns and wiping out their American values, and the worst of it is they look exactly like Americans—and as left-wing liberal satire on the ideological climate of conformism that McCarthyism produced, where the lack of emotion of the podpeople corresponds to the ethical blind eyes turned by Americans to the persecutions of their fellows by over-zealous McCarthyites.[3]
Despite the general agreement among film critics regarding these political connotations of the film, lead actor Kevin McCarthy said in an interview included on the 1998 DVD release that he felt no political allegory was intended. The interviewer stated that he had spoken with the author of the original novel, Jack Finney, who also professed to have intended no specific political allegory in the work.[4]
In his autobiography, "I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History", Walter Mirisch writes: "People began to read meanings into pictures that were never intended. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an example of that. I remember reading a magazine article arguing that the picture was intended as an allegory about the communist infiltration of America. From personal knowledge, neither Walter Wanger nor Don Siegel, who directed it, nor Dan Mainwaring, who wrote the script nor the original author Jack Finney, nor myself saw it as anything other than a thriller, pure and simple." [5]
[edit] Related works
- The Body Snatchers is the novel the movies are based on
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 remake)
- Body Snatchers (1993 remake)
- The Invasion (2007 film originally intended as a remake)
- The 2005 television series Invasion and Threshold explore the same themes.
[edit] References
- ^ a b c Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
- ^ Kevin McCarthy interview (1998 DVD)
- ^ Roberts, Adam (2000). Science Fiction; The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, pg. 80. ISBN 0-415-19204-8.
- ^ DVD commentary track, quoted in: Invasion of the Body Snatchers - review, Feo Amante's Horror Home Page, <http://www.feoamante.com/Movies/GHI/invasion_bsnatch_56.html>
- ^ Mirisch, Walter (2008). I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 39-40. ISBN 0299226409.
[edit] External links
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) at the Internet Movie Database
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) at Allmovie
- IMDB: "Things That Happen in All Three Films"; a list of eight parallels [registration required]
- "Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tale for Our Times," by John W. Whitehead, Gadfly Online, November 26, 2001; discusses the political themes of the original film
- McCarthyism and the Movies
- Comparison of novel to all 3 film adaptations
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