Synopsis
A distraught and disheveled Dr. Miles Bennell (McCarthy), having been arrested for obstructing traffic and generally acting deranged, is brought into a hospital for psychiatric evaluation. He tells his story to a skeptical psychiatrist (Whit Bissell).
Returning to his small town home from a trip, Miles finds that something strange
is going on. Some members of the community are reported by their friends and
relatives to be different
from their normal selves: Uncle Ira isn’t really
Uncle Ira any more, for example. Oddly, after a day or two these same friends and
relatives admit to having been wrong; Uncle Ira really is Uncle Ira after all.
Miles ascribes the initial paranoia to some form of mass hysteria and goes about
his normal business.
Some days later, Miles and his girlfriend Becky Driscoll (Wynter) are summoned to
the home of his friend Jack Belicec (Donovan) and Jack’s wife, Teddy (Jones), who
have discovered a curiously unfinished human body lying on a table in their house.
It is lifeless but bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Jack. Further exploration
leads the four friends to the greenhouse behind the Belicec residence, wherein
they find several human-sized pods containing more of the humanoid forms. Miles
dispatches them with a pitchfork. He then tries to notify the FBI and the state
police of an extraterrestrial invasion, only to discover that the phone lines have
been taken over by the aliens. With townsfolk being transformed at an alarming
rate, Miles and Becky go to Miles' office hoping to find a phone that works, and
they are forced to hide there for the night by pursuing aliens. Next morning, they
are cornered by the pod
Jack and other aliens, who urge Miles and Becky to
surrender peacefully. Managing to overpower their attackers, Miles and Becky
escape the office. Evidently the only humans left in town, they are chased by
hundreds of the pod
people.
Knowing they must stay awake or be taken over, Miles and Becky hide in a cave.
While Miles goes out to reconnoiter, Becky falls asleep and is replaced. Miles
realizes the change when he returns and tries to kiss her. Becky
is
unresponsive. She calls loudly to the other aliens. Miles, now alone, runs to a
nearby highway and desperately tries to stop the speeding cars, only to be ignored
and jeered at. Miles looks directly at the camera and shouts You’re next!
Back in the hospital, the doubtful psychiatrist is about to institutionalize the seemingly crazy Miles. At this moment, another psychiatrist enters and announces that there has been a terrible accident on a nearby highway. A truck has crashed. The vehicle was found to be carrying a cargo of man-sized pods. The psychiatrist, realizing that Miles’s story is true, picks up the nearest telephone and asks to be connected to the FBI. Heartbroken, but relieved, Miles slumps against the wall. There may still be time to stop them!
Discussion
Peace, Progress, and Prosperity.
That was the presidential election slogan
of Dwight David Eisenhower in 1956. He won. For many Americans, peace, progress,
and prosperity were the realities of the 1950s. They remember that decade as a
tranquil time when things were 'good'. World War II was long over, and, save for
the Korean Conflict, America was at peace. The economy was booming. Consumerism
was in full bloom. Many families, especially white families, were moving out of
the cities and into affordable new homes in the suburbs. The American Dream of
owning your own spread in the country,
complete with backyard patio and
swimming pool and away from urban blight, seemed achievable. Who better than the
bland, cherubic, avuncular Eisenhower (I Like Ike
) to preside over this
earthly paradise?
But were the 1950s an era of sweetness and light for all Americans? Not if you were a leftist, what with Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare, blacklists, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Not if you were an African-American living in the South, where Jim Crow laws were still enforced and black teenagers like Emmett Till were killed brutally for supposedly whistling at white women. But perhaps most widespread of all sources of fear in the decade was The Bomb. It was a time of fallout shelters and schoolchildren taking refuge under their desks during what were probably futile drills. The fear of nuclear holocaust was certainly prominent in the minds of many Americans.
Perhaps not surprisingly, big-budget Hollywood movies with big-name stars
generally avoided dealing with these issues. It was left to certain low-budget,
B-level films to tackle them, however tangentially. Among these films were a
handful of 1950s science fiction classics:
The Thing from Another World (1951), with its completely hostile
alien (who turns out to be a vegetable) and exhortation to
Keep Watching the Skies,
Invaders From Mars, (1953) whose
youthful hero is caught in a seemingly endlessly repeating nightmare in which his
loving parents are turned into menacing zombies by Martian invaders,
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) with its friendly (sort-of)
extraterrestrial and his potentially lethal robot who together threaten the earth
with annihilation if its inhabitants don’t stop fighting and developing weapons of
mass destruction.
Arguably the best of all these films is
Invasion Of the Body Snatchers (1956). As conceived by producer
Walter Wanger, director Don Siegel, and writer Daniel Mainwaring, the film was
meant to end with Kevin McCarthy's frantic, hopeless ravings of
You're next!
fading into black. Studio executives at Allied Artists,
feeling that this ending was too downbeat, demanded a more hopeful one. Wanger,
Siegel, and Mainwaring reluctantly agreed to shoot a wraparound to mollify the
bigwigs, resulting in the main story becoming a flashback.
Even with the somewhat compromised ending, Invasion of the Body Snatchers remains a classic of 1950s paranoia. Siegel, known more for police procedurals such as The Line Up (1958) and Dirty Harry (1971) than for science fiction, keeps the pace brisk. The crisp back-and-white photography by Ellsworth Fredericks and the taut musical score by Carmen Dragon add immeasurably to the proceedings. Use of a relatively unknown actor in the lead part assists in the suspension of disbelief needed to make the film work. If a star, say Gregory Peck or Glenn Ford, had been cast as Miles the audience might have had more difficulty in accepting the movie’s premise. The supporting cast, which included such familiar character actors as Larry Gates, Ralph Dumke. Virginia Christine, Richard Deacon, and Robert Osterloh, is excellent. Look for future superstar director Sam Peckinpah in a bit part as a meter reader who may be doing more in the basement than just reading the meter!
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Invasion Of the Body Snatchers is the fact that both liberals and conservatives saw it as a political allegory that supported their views. Conservatives saw the zombie-like pod people as representing brain-washed victims of the Communist Conspiracy. Liberals, on the other hand, saw them as automatons, frightened into mindless conformity by right-wing witch hunters like Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. How many movies have appealed to both ends of the political spectrum?
Further Reading