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Jack Finney's 1955 novel "The Body Snatchers" gets remade almost every decade. If that isn’t the mark of eternal entertainment then I don’t know what is. Having read the novel, I can tell you that it is terrifying and that there have only been two adaptations worth seeing. Director Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, from 1956, is where you should start. Siegel, a B-movie pioneer and mentor to Clint Eastwood, threw everything into this gem and most of it still sticks for today’s audience.
Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) has a story to tell. Frantic and nearly hysterical, he can only claim to not be insane. He just wants someone to hear him out. Dr. Hills (Whit Bissell) gets to be the lucky one.
The aliens have landed. They aren’t friendly and they are taking over.
Santa Mira, California, you see, has been overrun by aliens. They emerge from pods and take the forms of friends, neighbors, strangers, and enemies while they sleep. The real people never wake up. Pod people take their place in the world. Bennell, having lost his best friend (King Donovan) and girlfriend (Dana Wynter) to sleep and pods, has outrun them and traveled a great distance to warn others.
No one believes him.
Adapted for the screen by Daniel Mainwaring, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a tight thriller that never outstays its welcome with needless exposition and repetitive scares. Siegel keeps the action tight and the tension tighter throughout this cold war era thriller and manages to strike a nerve that resonates today. It’s a cautionary tale about blind conformity and not using your noggin when fear and hype rule the scene. For America, it’s a cautionary tale we seriously need to heed – which is why it probably gets remade as often as it does.
McCarthy is simply great as the man on the edge of sanity. His performance is a milestone in the B-movie market and, as popular as the movie became, he would eventually play the character twice more; the most famous being in the 1978 remake where he crashes into the windshield of a car screaming his famous lines.
While the film eventually went down into the culture annuls of time, critics largely ignored its first run in theatres. Invasion of the Body Snatchers changed the way audiences “read” sci-fi horror films. Here, with Siegel’s swift construction and producer Walter Wanger’s attention to detail, the film pushes its low budget and drive-in theatrics into places that feel very real.
The film might have sacrificed its original ending (McCarthy screaming while truckloads of pods pass by) to a nervous studio, but that’s no reason to dismiss this little gem from the 1950s. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is of historical and cultural significance and one of the better B-movies of American cinema.
Let the deconstruction of conformity in the 1950s begin!
MPAA Rating: This title has not been rated by the MPAA.
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