1956
DIRECTOR: DON SIEGEL PRODUCER: WALTER WANGER SCREENPLAY: DANIEL MAINWARING, BASED ON THE COLLIER’S MAGAZINE SERIAL BY JACK FINNEY STARRING: KEVIN MCCARTHY (DR. MILES BENNELL), DANA WYNTER (BECKY DRISCOLL), LARRY GATES (DR. DANNY KAUFFMAN), KING DONOVAN (JACK BELICEC), CAROLYN JONES (THEODORA “TEDDY” BELICEC), JEAN WILLES (NURSE SALLY WITHERS), RALPH DUMKE (POLICE CHIEF NICK GRIVETT), VIRGINIA CHRISTINE (WILMA LENTZ)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
ALLIED ARTISTS • BLACK AND WHITE, 80 MINUTES
A small-town doctor is reunited with his high-school sweetheart as they fight the emotionless alien clones that are replacing their friends and neighbors.
While other 1950s sci-fi pictures were scrambling to outdo each other with increasingly elaborate monsters, spaceships, and robots, Don Siegel’s brilliantly streamlined Invasion of the Body Snatchers surpassed them all with its encroaching grip of psychological terror. This is science fiction meets film noir, its story told in a flashback, with shadowy lighting and off-kilter angles. The enemy is not a man from space, but plants from space: plants that grow into seedpods with the ability to replicate and replace humans down to the last detail, except the very essence that makes them human.
Plant life surrounds us—the trees in the yard, the flowers in the vase at home, the potted plants in the office—but Jack Finney was the first writer to introduce menacing vegetation into popular fiction. According to author Stephen King, Finney’s original tale The Body Snatchers “set the mold for what we now call the horror novel.” When the first part of Finney’s saga appeared in Collier’s magazine in 1954, Walter Mirisch, head of Allied Artists studio, purchased the screen rights and hired Walter Wanger to produce the adaptation as a quick B picture. Talented theater actors were cast instead of big-name stars: Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Miles Bennell and Dana Wynter as his love interest, Becky Driscoll. Shot for $350,000 at real California locations on a brisk nineteen-day schedule, the film is a masterpiece of economy.
Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Miles Bennell
From the moment Miles arrives in his hometown of Santa Mira, he notices strange goings-on. People are changing, but no one can say exactly how. A tense mood is established using dialogue, editing, and subtly dramatic music. With a bare minimum of special effects, suspicion gradually ramps up to paranoia, then sheer terror. The only effects used were plaster of Paris molds of the actors, prop seedpods, and a few soap bubbles.
Director Siegel’s original cut was even shorter than the eighty-minute final version, but the studio “pods” (as Siegel called the men in charge) insisted on bookending the film with scenes of Miles seeking help from doctors in a nearby town. The authorities are alerted to the alien invasion, ensuring a more hopeful ending. Though Siegel and latter-day fans have criticized the film for these additions, Finney’s original story ended even more optimistically, with all four main characters surviving and triumphing over the pods.
Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter
A lobby card featuring Dana Wynter, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones, and Kevin McCarthy
Largely dismissed by serious film critics at the time of its release, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has thrived, like its unstoppable pods, and firmly implanted itself in our culture. Its impact can be seen across all film genres, from the psychological suspense of The Stepford Wives (1975) to the monster that gets you while you sleep in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) to the musical comedy about a man-eating alien plant, Little Shop of Horrors (1986). Hollywood has even remade the film three times.
Updating a sci-fi classic is not easy, but renegade director Philip Kaufman managed to do justice to the original with his paranoid, hyperrealistic 1978 reboot. Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers speculates what would happen if the pods from 1956 found their way from the small town of Santa Mira to the city of San Francisco, twenty-two years later.
Brooke Adams in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers
This time, telling the difference between clones and humans is more challenging in the teeming ratrace of modern urban life. Health-department workers Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) and Matthew (Donald Sutherland) and their friends Jack and Nancy—brought to life with endearingly human quirks by Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright—seem to be the only four people in the city who notice the takeover. Leonard Nimoy as psychiatrist Dr. David Kibner, attempts to explain the phenomenon away with Spock-like analysis, but his logic only serves to make him virtually indistinguishable from his duplicate. Nancy, a freethinker who plays music for her plants, is the unsung hero of the story. Her belief in aliens and conspiracy theories arms her with the skills to fight the pod people until the bitter end—and Kaufman’s ending is much more bitter than Siegel’s.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers endures because of its underlying message. In fact, the message may be more relevant than ever in today’s digital age, when a steady barrage of increasingly sophisticated gadgets makes us feel less than human. A line from Finney’s novel, “Sometimes I think we’re refining all humanity out of our lives,” could apply to a variety of refinements of modern-day existence, from GPS to texting.
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