August 2007

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

• Starring: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones
• Director: Don Siegel
• Theatrical release: 1956
• DVD release: 1998
• Video: 2:1 (widescreen)
• Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0
• Released by: Republic Studios

The most haunting, strangely poetic science-fiction picture ever.
-- Peter Bogdanovich

Author-director-actor Peter Bogdanovich refers to director Don Siegel as "action’s intellectual." Clint Eastwood says he learned most of what he knows about directing from Siegel. What they love about Siegel’s directing style is that it is clean and uncluttered, with few showy touches. Siegel tries to tell a story and stay out of its way.

Through most of his career, Siegel (1912-1991) made B movies -- features to be shown at drive-ins, such as Riot in Cell Block 11 and Hell is for Heroes. He was 44 when Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released. Despite working from the unacclaimed shadowy confines of science fiction, Siegel was able to fashion a film about alienation (literally) and denial that still has the power to unnerve an audience.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes place in the small town of Santa Mira, California. Doctor Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) has been called back from a convention because many of his patients are making appointments to bring in family members who just aren’t acting like themselves. He gets suspicious when most of the people don’t show up for their appointments. It’s not long before Dr. Bennell and his girlfriend, Becky (Carolyn Jones), discover the cause: alien pods that can reshape themselves into an exact replica of a person, then snatch their body and personality while the real human is sleeping. However, the doppelgängers are different from their models: They have no emotions, morals, or spirit. The doctor and a few friends set out to save the town … but can they do it before they themselves fall asleep?

In 1956, when Invasion was released, McCarthyism was coming slowly to a halt. For almost ten years, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy had screamed to the American public that most artists and journalists were pinko Commies, and tried to enforce a paranoid conformity to über-American ideals. When television journalist Edward R. Murrow finally had the courage to confront McCarthy, his house of cards began to crumble. That was lucky timing for Siegel and his crew -- McCarthy, a narcissistic megalomaniac, would probably have thought they’d aimed Invasion of the Body Snatchers at him.

He would have been partially correct. The screenwriter, Daniel Mainwaring, had been blacklisted and had to work under pseudonyms. You can easily imagine that pods taking over a human’s body and leaving it a shell as Mainwaring’s metaphor for the anti-Communist pledge demanded of all Americans by McCarthy’s acolytes. The producer, Walter Wanger, might also have wanted the film to serve metaphorically. Convicted of shooting his wife’s lover, Wanger had served time in prison, where he had become convinced that the penal system was a travesty. He might have seen the pods’ spirit-snatching as representing prison.

The McCarthy-baiting theories of the film’s origins remain popular to this day. But Don Siegel saw something at work in it that was even more nefarious than McCarthyism. He told Bogdanovich:

This is probably my best film -- because I (usually) hide behind a façade of bad scripts, telling stories of no import -- and 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. I wanted to get it over and I didn’t know a better way to get it over than this particular film.*

What Siegel got over is an amazing piece of storytelling, a remarkably scary film without any gore or mayhem. Within the confines of a short, low-budget B movie, Siegel creates a sense of paranoid foreboding. He makes us believe that the pods are taking from us something more precious than our lives: our spirits.

The most amazing fact about Invasion of the Body Snatchers is that it was an even better film before Allied Artists grew scared of antagonizing the McCarthyites and forced Siegel to tack on a new beginning and ending.

WARNING: SPOILER BEGINS

As released, Invasion of the Body Snatchers begins with Dr. Bennell acting crazy in an emergency room, raving about aliens and invasions. He then tells the film’s entire story in flashback. At the end, no one believes him -- until another doctor starts talking about a crash between a Greyhound bus and a truck outbound from Santa Mira, and mentions how they had to drag the driver out from under a pile of weird seedpods. Dr. Bennell is vindicated, and the full force of the police system is called in to save the day. It’s a nice, neat, happy ending. But, as Siegel explained to Bogdanovich:

They insisted on a prologue and epilogue, which I shot in self defense. If I didn’t, they were going to have one of their pod directors do it. … The ending of the picture, as it was, was one of the most dramatic I’ve ever done and, for that matter, ever seen. … It ended with Kevin McCarthy pointing his finger at the audience and screaming, "You’re next!" -- and the curtain came down and you were in a state of shock because you didn’t know if the person sitting next to you might be a pod.*

Where is a director’s cut when you need it? Siegel said that you could just start the film after the prologue and stop it before the epilogue, but that in order to make those fit, he had had to cut and rearrange several other parts of the film. Republic Studios apparently lacks the money for a director’s cut. Or maybe the pieces Siegel cut no longer exist. We can only dream of seeing it the way Siegel shot it. Maybe someday.

END OF SPOILER

Republic’s DVD offers a nice picture, good sound, a brief but fascinating discussion with Kevin McCarthy, and the original trailer. It’s also out of print, though it doesn’t seem difficult to find a copy from a reputable seller at a reasonable price. As I write this, Amazon has 13 new and used copies available, starting at $9.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers deserves a full-on Criterion Collection edition. (Their laserdisc edition in 1993 wasn’t up to their usual standard.) The film was selected to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1994, so, at least we know the negatives are safe, awaiting a company with foresight.

One final word about the McCarthy issue: I think we can get a clue of the director’s intentions by comparing a statement by Dr. Bennell with a proclamation by Siegel:

Dr. Bennell: I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn’t seem to mind. … All of us -- a little bit -- we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.

Don Siegel: I think the world is sick. … Most people go unthinking about their work. They’re not aware of what’s going on about them; they’re very selfish. I get so wrapped up in the work I’m doing, I’m not even aware that many less fortunate people are out of work, or starving, or in need of help. I’m blinded by being busy. … I’m becoming one of those people I hate. I’m becoming a pod.*

Great movies often act as Rorschach tests. Each viewer finds his or her own meaning in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and for me, it’s about how precious a person’s soul is. Siegel was right -- it’s his best film, if for no other reason than that he revealed this truth: There are pod people in the world, and we all have to fight to make sure we’re not next.

...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com

*The statements by Don Siegel come from Peter Bogdanovich’s superb Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. The book is a must for any film lover.

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