Films: 1950s
(1956) Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Director: Don Siegel
Release: 1956
Don Siegel achieves an almost Hitchcockian perfection of paranoia in his 1956 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Drenched in low to the ground, noir camera angles; possessing a culturally and politically spot-on script by Daniel Mainwaring and featuring Kevin McCarthy's greatest performance, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is the ultimate American fascism fantasy of its decade.
The film is told in flashback, narrated by McCarthy's Dr. Miles Bennett. Mainwaring's script keeps Bennett's voice-overs to a minimum, supplying only enough to open a door onto a sort of Monday-morning quarterbacking as the doctor notes where he should have paid closer attention or listened to a hunch.
Dyna Winter plays Becky Driscoll and she and McCarthy create a solid romance on screen; a mature post-divorce dating that seems sophisticated for its time (the height of the nuclear family) and may in fact point to some cultural signifiers when the two are eventually subject to persecution.
Bennett and Driscoll are freshly back in town, where they discover that the residents of Santa Mira, California suffer a peculiar psychological malady that seems to come and go overnight.
While Bennett gently recommends Driscoll's cousin to a psychiatrist, in hopes of remedying her suspicion that Uncle Ira is not himself (that is, the woman is certain that her Uncle Ira has actually been replaced by an imposter), he cannot refer anyone in the case of Jack and Theodora Belicec discovering what appears to be a dead body in their home.
It is a body without fingerprints, or any defining features. Overnight, however, it transforms into a perfect double of Jack and vanishes. Bennett discovers similar bodies emerging from seed-like pods in his garden house. This marks the descent of the principles into a fight-or-flight spiral, pursued by the increasingly copasetic and persistant Santa Mirans, who, between distributing the pods to neighboring towns, seek to wrangle and duplicate the last two humans that know their secret.
Siegel's direction of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" works because he spends time creating a Santa Mira in which anyone could live. His Californian town is idyllic but realistic, sleepy but sharp, neighborly and a place where old lovers return to lick their wounds and begin again.
Incrementally, Siegal and Mainwaring introduce essential wrongness to the situation, but when the mystery reaches its apex they spare no time in revealing the nature of the threat.
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" doesn't linger, and it doesn't keep its audience in the dark any longer than necessary. It is divided evenly between a mystery and an escape, and each has importance.
The thread of psychology and human nature is woven through both elements of the film, and even when McCarthy and Winter have to grapple with some fairly ungainly dialogue about the worth of humanity, they couple it with some convincing physicality that allows the bulging writing to fit into a desperate mind and thus, an acceptable context.
Additionally, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" spares no punches. Its heroes are stripped of what they've earned, what they've trusted and what they love. The relentless process of subjugation is bigger than its protagonists, and the thrust of the film is less about Bennett and Driscoll overcoming their surroundings, and more about how they react to the inevitability of being overcome.
Winter and McCarty deliver textured and revisitable performances, set against shadowy, rain-slick set pieces that play with the comforts of small town and the attendant, lurking inability to hide oneself in a place where everybody knows everybody.
Siegel manages to create much with only a little.
The one scene in which the pods vomit out their contents is masterfully edited to avoid revealing anything distracting. The subsequent scene in which the duplicates must be disposed of is correctly focused on the face of the humans, who must pitchfork the visages of their neighbors.
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" otherwise occurs entirely in the mind, and its aliens are devoid of any overtly horrifying features. It is their all-too-perfect explanation of the sameness they desire, their enforced freedom from emotion and ambition, that becomes the special effect of note. The horror here, is in the seductive reality of the invaders' plan.
There are two endings not to give away in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
It is interesting to watch where Siegel and Mainwaring actually signify the original ending. It's nearly perfect. The attendent denouement would have derailed a film in hands of lesser skill, but the filmmakers manage to create a certain ambiguity about the overtly Hollywood ending that was demanded by executives.
Watching both, back-to-back as edited, may be considered an early and subversive use of the director's cut in popular cinema.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
