| Invasion of the Body Snatchers | |
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Theatrical poster |
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| Directed by | Don Siegel |
| Produced by | Walter Wanger |
| Screenplay by | Daniel Mainwaring |
| Story by | Jack Finney |
| Starring | Kevin McCarthy Dana Wynter King Donovan Carolyn Jones Larry Gates |
| Music by | Carmen Dragon |
| Cinematography | Ellsworth Fredericks |
| Editing by | Robert S. Eisen |
| Distributed by | Allied Artists Pictures Corporation Paramount Pictures (1981 reconstruction) |
| Release date(s) | February 5, 1956 |
| Running time | 80 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $382,190 |
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 US-American science fiction film directed by Don Siegel and starring Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter. Daniel Mainwaring adapted the screenplay from Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers. 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 story depicts an extraterrestrial invasion in a small Californian town. The invaders replace human beings with duplicates which appear identical on the surface but are devoid of any emotion or individuality. A local doctor tries to stop them.
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In the fictional town of Santa Mira, California, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), a local doctor, finds a rash of patients accusing their loved ones of being impostors. Another patient is a former sweetheart of his, recent divorcée Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), who tells him that her cousin, Wilma, has this same strange fear about Uncle Ira. Dr. Dan Kauffman (Larry Gates), psychiatrist in town, assures Bennell that the cases are nothing but "epidemic mass hysteria".
That same evening, Bennell's friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan) finds a body with his features, though not yet fully developed. The next duplicate found is a copy of Becky in her house's cellar. When Bennell calls Kauffman to the scene, the bodies have mysteriously disappeared, with Kauffman suspecting Bennell of falling for the same hysteria. The following night, Bennell, Becky, Jack and his wife Teddy again find duplicates of themselves, emerging from giant pods. They conclude that the townspeople are in fact being replaced by perfect physical copies in their sleep. As the phone operator claims that no distant calls are possible, Jack and Teddy drive away to get help. Bennell and Becky discover that most inhabitants have already been replaced, now devoid of any human warmth and individuality. They flee to Bennell's office to hide for the night.
The next morning they see how truckloads of pods are taken to neighbourhood towns. Kauffman and Jack, both too with changed personalities, enter and explain, that an extraterrestrial life form is responsible for this invisible invasion. After the takeover, they resume, life has lost its frustrating complexity because all emotions and sense of individuality have vanished. Bennell and Becky manage to escape, but while they hide in a mine outside of town, Becky falls asleep for a moment and is instantly subverted. With the "pod people" close behind, Bennell runs onto the highway, frantically screaming to the passing motorists, "They're here already! You're next! You're next!"
In a frame story, Bennell is held by the police and questioned by a doctor in a clinic. The men doubt Bennell's story - until they receive news of an accident in which a truck carrying strange giant pods was involved. The police are quick to alert the authorities.
Jack Finney's novel ends with the extraterrestrials leaving earth after they find many humans offering too much resistance, despite having almost no reasonable chance against the invaders. Also, the "pod people" have a life span of no more than 5 years. As a result, 5 years after taking over the last human being, the invaders would have to look for a new planet with new life forms as hosts – leaving behind a depopulated earth.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was originally budgeted for a 24-day schedule at USD $454,864 and the studio asked Wanger to cut the budget significantly. The producer proposed a shooting schedule of 20 days and a budget of $350,000.[1]
Initially, Wanger considered Gig Young, Dick Powell, Joseph Cotten and several others for the role of Miles. For Becky, he thought of casting Anne Bancroft, Donna Reed, Kim Hunter, Vera Miles and others. With the lower budget, Wanger had to abandon these choices and cast Richard Kiley, who had just starred in Phoenix City Story for Allied Artists.[1] Kiley turned the role down and Wanger cast two relative newcomers in the lead roles: Kevin McCarthy, who had just starred in Siegel's Annapolis Story, and Dana Wynter, who had done several major dramatic roles on television.[2]
Originally, producer Walter Wanger and director Don Siegel wanted to shoot Invasion of the Body Snatchers on location in the town Jack Finney described in his novel: Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco.[1] In the first week of January 1955, Siegel, Wanger, and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring visited Finney to talk about the film version and to take a look at Mill Valley. The location proved to be too expensive and Siegel and some Allied Artists executives found locations resembling Mill Valley in Sierra Madre, Chatsworth, Glendale, the Los Feliz neighborhood and in Bronson and Beachwood Canyons - all of which would make up the town of "Santa Mira" for the film.[1] In addition to these outdoor locations, much of the film was shot in the Allied Artists studio on the east side of Hollywood.
The film was shot by cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks in 23 days between March 23, 1955 and April 18, 1955. The cast and crew worked a six-day week with only Sundays off.[1] The production went over schedule by three days because of night-for-night shooting that Siegel wanted. Additional photography took place in September 1955, filming a frame story which the studio insisted on (see Original intended ending). The final budget was $382,190.
The project was originally called The Body Snatchers after the Finney serial.[3] However, Wanger wanted to avoid confusion with the Val Lewton 1945 horror film with a very similar title. The producer was unable to come up with a title and accepted the studio's choice, They Come from Another World that was assigned in summer 1955. Siegel protested this title and suggested two alternatives, Better Off Dead and Sleep No More, while Wanger offered Evil in the Night and World in Danger. None of these were chosen as the studio finally settled on Invasion of the Body Snatchers in late 1955.[3]
Wanger wanted to add a variety of speeches and prefaces.[4] He suggested a voice-over introduction for Miles.[5] While the film was being shot, Wanger tried to get permission in England to use a Winston Churchill quotation as a preface to the film. The producer also tried to get Orson Welles to voice the preface and a trailer for the film. He wrote speeches for Welles' opening on June 15, 1955 and spent considerable time trying to persuade Welles to do it, but was unsuccessful. Wanger considered science fiction author Ray Bradbury instead, but this did not happen, either.[5] Mainwaring eventually wrote the voice-over narration himself.[3]
The studio scheduled three previews for the film on the last days of June and the first day of July 1955.[5] According to Wanger's memos at the time, the previews were successful. However, later reports by Mainwaring and Siegel contradict this, claiming that audiences could not follow the film and laughed in the wrong places. In response, the studio removed much of the film's humor, "humanity" and "quality," according to Wanger.[5] He scheduled another preview in mid-August that did not go well. The studio decided to change the film's title to a more conventional science fiction one. In later interviews, Siegel pointed out that it was studio policy not to mix humor with horror.[5]
Wanger saw the final cut in December 1955 and protested the use of the Superscope format.[3] Its use had been a part of the early plans for the film, but the first print was not made until December. Wanger felt that the film lost sharpness and detail. Siegel had originally shot Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Superscope was a post-production lab process designed to create an anamorphic print from non-anamorphic source material that would be projected at an aspect ratio of 2.00:1.[3][6]
Both Siegel and Mainwaring were satisfied with the film as shot. It was originally intended to end with Miles screaming hysterically as truckloads of pods pass him by.[4] 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 which is thus told mainly in flashback. In this version the movie begins with a ranting Bennell kept in custody in a hospital emergency ward. He then tells an arriving doctor (Whit Bissell) his story. 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.
Mainwaring scripted this framing story and Siegel shot it on September 16, 1955 at Allied Artists.[3] In a later interview, Siegel complained: "The film was nearly ruined by those in charge at Allied Artists who added a preface and ending that I don't like."[7] In his autobiography, Siegel added that "Wanger was very much against this, as was I. However, he begged me to shoot it to protect the film, and I reluctantly consented […]".[8]
While the Internet Movie Database states that the film's original ending had been reinstated for a re-release in 1979,[9] Steve Biodrowski of Cinefantastique magazine claims that the film is still being released with its additional footage, including a screening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2005, honouring director Don Siegel.[10]
Though disapproved of by most reviewers, George Turner (in American Cinematographer)[11] and Danny Peary (in Cult Movies)[12] endorsed the subsequently added frame story. Nonetheless, Peary emphasised that the additional scenes changed significantly what he saw as the film's original intention (see Themes).
When the film was released domestically in February 1956, many theatres displayed several of the pods (made of paper) at theatre lobbies and entrances along with large lifelike black and white cutouts of McCarthy and Wynter running frantically away from a crowd. The movie made over $1 million in its first month. In 1956 alone, the movie made over $2.5 million in the USA. When the British issue (which had cuts imposed by the British censors[13]) took place in late 1956, the film made over a half million dollars in ticket sales.[3]
Some reviewers found a comment on the dangers faced of America turning a blind eye to McCarthyism,[14] or of bland conformity in postwar Dwight D. Eisenhower-era America. Others have viewed it as an allegory for the loss of personal autonomy in the Soviet Union or communist systems in general.[15] For the BBC, David Wood summarised the circulating popular interpretations of the film as follows: "The sense of post-war, anti-communist paranoia is acute, as is the temptation to view the film as a metaphor for the tyranny of the McCarthy era."[16] Danny Peary in Cult Movies pointed out that the addition of the framing story had changed the film's stance from anti-McCarthyite to anti-communist.[12]
In W. S. Pooles Monsters in America, the film is argued to be an indictment of the damage to the human personality caused by reductionist modern ideologies both of the Right and the Left.[17] In An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, Carlos Clarens saw a trend manifesting itself in Science Fiction films, dealing with dehumanization and fear of the loss of individual identity, being historically connected to the end of "the Korean War and the well publicized reports coming out of it of brainwashing techniques".[18] Comparing Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Robert Aldrich's Kiss me Deadly and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, Brian Neve found a sense of disillusionment rather than straightforward messages, with all three films being "less radical in any positive sense than reflective of the decline of [the screenwriters'] great liberal hopes".[19]
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.[20]
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."[21]
Don Siegel spoke more openly of an existing allegorical subtext, but denied a strictly political point of view: "[…] I felt that this was a very important story. I think that the world is populated by pods and I wanted to show them. I think so many people have no feeling about cultural things, no feeling of pain, of sorrow. […] The political reference to Senator McCarthy and totalitarianism was inescapable but I tried not to emphasize it because I feel that motion pictures are primarily to entertain and I did not want to preach."[22]
Largely ignored by critics on its initial run[11], Invasion of the Body Snatchers received wide critical acclaim in retrospect and is considered one of the best films of 1956.[23][24][25] The film holds a 97% "Fresh" rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes[26]. In recent years, critics have hailed the film as a "genuine Sci-Fi classic" (Dan Druker, Chicago Reader)[27], "influential, and still very scary" (Leonard Maltin)[28] and one of the "most resonant" and "one of the simplest" of the genre (Time Out)[29].
In 1993, 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".[30] In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "Ten top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was acknowledged as the ninth best film in the science fiction genre.[31] The film was also placed on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills, a list of America's most heart-pounding films.[32] The film was included on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments.[33] Similarly, the Chicago Film Critics Association named it the 29th scariest film ever made.[34] Time magazine included Invasion of the Body Snatchers on their list of 100 all-time best films,[35] the top 10 1950s Sci-Fi Movies,[36] and Top 25 Horror Films.[37]
The film was released on DVD in 1998 by US-label Republic (an identical re-release by Artisan followed in 2002). It includes the Superscope version plus a version in the Academy ratio. The latter is not the original full frame edition but a pan and scan-reworking of the Superscope edition, losing even more visual information.
DVD editions also exist on the British (including a computer colourized version), German (as Die Dämonischen) and Spanish market (as La Invasión de los Ladrones de Cuerpos).
Listed are only works directly connected to Jack Finney's novel or Don Siegel's film, not thematically related works like Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters and its dramatizations, Val Guest's Quatermass 2 or Gene Fowler's I Married a Monster from Outer Space.
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