SYNOPSIS

Dr. Miles Bennell returns to his hometown, Santa Mira, California, to find that many of his patients are suffering from a mysterious but similar malady. They are coming to him insisting that family members and loved ones are impersonators, devoid of emotion, and not the people they used to know. Miles at first tends to believe a fellow psychiatrist's diagnosis that it's all a case of mass hysteria. But after discovering a half-formed replica of his friend Jack, and later giant seed pods in his greenhouse, Miles and his girlfriend Becky confront their worst fears - that these mysterious pods are in fact replacing the humans of the town when they sleep. In the midst of the invasion, Miles and Becky try to escape and warn the authorities.

Director: Don Siegel
Producer: Walter Wanger
Writer: Daniel Mainwaring, from the novel "The Body Snatchers" by Jack Finney
Cinematography: Ellsworth Fredericks
Editing: Robert S. Eisen
Production Design: Ted Haworth
Original Music: Carmen Dragon
Cast: Kevin McCarthy (Miles Bennell), Dana Wynter (Becky Driscoll), King Donovan (Jack Belicec), Carolyn Jones (Teddy Belicec), Larry Gates (Dr. Dan Kauffman).
BW-80m.

Why INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS is Essential

A debate has raged for years over the meaning and subtext of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Very much a product of its era, the Cold-War 1950s, analysts have seen in it a metaphor for the creeping threat of Communism, portrayed at this point in U.S. history as soulless, without feeling or sense of beauty - an attempt to make all its citizens lockstep into a sameness of purpose and behavior. Certainly that notion was reinforced by reports around this time of the Ôbrainwashing' of captured American troops by the Chinese Communists during the Korean War. Still others have seen the movie as a depiction of the era's conformity and the dangerous path of McCarthyism, forcing everyone to think and believe the same and leaving no room for eccentricity or individual expression. And the strong-arm attempts to silence dissent in this period, as well as the incarceration and blacklisting of talented film artists on the pretext of "dangerous" political beliefs, lent extra weight to that notion. As for the director, Don Siegel, he was mostly evasive on this question, while conceding one couldn't help but read those messages into the picture. For him, however, "pod people" were everywhere, especially in the film industry which was teeming with individuals with their eye on the lowest common denominator; producers simply to make a quick buck to the detriment of a filmmaker's creativity. And for producer Walter Wanger, the appeal of Jack Finney's story may have been in its echoes of the regimented prison life Wanger had only recently experienced (he had served time for shooting and wounding the agent (Jennings Lang) of his wife, actress Joan Bennett).

Whatever subtext - if any - may have been intended, it's clear the appeal of Invasion of the Body Snatchers goes beyond Cold War politics into an anxiety more deeply rooted in human consciousness - the fear of loss of identity, dehumanization, and of not knowing who can be trusted in an increasingly complex world. Possession of ordinary people by alien entities, whether gods or demons, figures in the oldest myths. When the homogenization and mechanization of the modern world is added to that, the fear is compounded. A lot of movies have been made on this theme in dozens of variations. What makes Invasion of the Body Snatchers so memorable is that, even in its own low-budget, B-picture context, it taps into a believable paranoia.

Siegel grounds the picture by shooting on location in familiar surroundings, then infuses them with a relentlessly building sense of unease. There are very few special effects. Other than brief glimpses of the pods and a couple of violent outbreaks, nothing is much stranger than we would encounter on any day except that the everyday has been transformed into something threatening.

Siegel keeps the film moving and tension building through a number of devices he perfected in the tightly structured action films by which he made his mark as a director: characters constantly in motion, scenes played out in claustrophobic tight quarters or in near darkness, the point of view staying tightly focused on the main protagonist (Miles), cutting between chilling close-ups and mysterious long shots.

The movie was not released the way the director intended; all of the humor had been cut out by the studio, and a tacked-on beginning and ending with narration was forced on Siegel to keep the story from being so bleak and hopeless. But even that interference can't dull the essential power and appeal. Siegel's "little picture" has outlasted some of the bigger ones of its time, thanks to the combination of a director working at top form and a story that plays on our deepest human fears.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was shot on location in the small town of Sierra Madre, California and in and around Bronson Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. It took nineteen days to shoot at a cost of approximately $300,000. For the casting, Vera Miles was considered for the role of Becky Driscoll, Miles' girlfriend, but producer Walter Wanger decided he wanted to use Dana Wynter, a young actress who was under contract to Fox. Kevin McCarthy had already worked with Siegel on a previous film, An Annapolis Story (1955), so they had a good working rapport; McCarthy even suggested a less sensational title for the film, "Sleep No More" but the studio brass rejected it as too high brow. In addition to Carolyn Jones and King Donovan, the film's second leads, the rest of the cast was comprised of first rate character actors such as Whit Bissell, Richard Deacon and, in a bit part, future director Sam Peckinpah as the meter reader (he also served as the dialogue director on the film).

Of course, the real stars of Invasion of the Body Snatchers are the pods. Siegel recalled in his autobiography, that "My brilliant art director, Ted Haworth, figured out a way of creating the pods that was simple and relatively inexpensive (around $30,000). The most difficult part was when the pods burst open, revealing exact likenesses of our leading actors. Naturally, they had to have naked impressions of their bodies made out of thin, skin-tight latex. Foaming soap bubbles would gradually disappear, revealing, yet still concealing, their entire bodies." This process required body casts of the lead actors.

One aspect of Invasion of the Body Snatchers that continues to arouse controversy and divide viewers even today is the fact that the film exists in two different versions, one with a downbeat ending, the other with a more hopeful one. Siegel also revealed that he had originally included several humorous touches in his final cut which the studio, Allied Artists, later edited out without his approval. "In their hallowed words, 'horror films are horror films and there's no room for humor,' Siegel recalled. I translated it to mean that in their pod brains there was no room for humor. The studio also insisted on a prologue and an epilogue. Wanger was very much against this, as was I. However, he begged me to shoot it to protect the film, and I reluctantly consented...Oddly enough, in Europe and in the 'underground' in America, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was shown with the prologue and epilogue edited out. Like this, it was known as 'the Siegel version.'" Most viewers, however, are probably more familiar with the official Allied Artists cut, which ends with McCarthy convincing a psychiatrist and hospital doctor to contact the FBI. In Siegel's more pessimistic climax, McCarthy spots a truckload of pods on its way to the next town while passing motorists ignore his frantic attempts to warn them.

by Rob Nixon & Jeff Stafford