Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

1956

Directed by Don Siegel
Starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones

We've got another first here on the ol' blog, ladies and gentlemen.  This is the first version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers  I've ever seen, and that is some accomplishment considering just how many times this flick has been remade/readapted.  There's the late '70s version with Donald Sutherland's fantastic curly hair, there's the 1994 one with Meg Tilly and her retained ridiculous level of hotness after her even more ridiculous '80s prime, and then there's the Nicole Kidman version.  The less said about that one the better, because it looked boring as all get out.  They also seemed to take some words away from the title with each successive reboot.  George Orwell was right about language.  Now I've seen the O.G. version and have nothing else to compare it to, and I can report that this story is definitely worth the hype and the spot that it has in the NATIONAL FILM REGISTRY.  Suck it, anti-horror snobs.

Much like last week's film, Them!, this one was granted a big budget, a respected director and an accomplished cast by its studio and expected to be a big deal.  While a lot of people point to this period of history as a time when the studios relegated horror and thriller films to the summer teenage dead-time, I think they actually gave these flicks MORE respect then.  Universal had a whole wing of its library dedicated to heavily made-up monsters, after all.  Much like all of those Universal monsters, Warner Bros. had themselves a really strong piece of source material in the 1954 Jack Finney novel Body Snatchers, and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring snatched (/tomatoes) every last bit of tension that he could get from Finney's no-doubt tobacco-stained fingers.  How so?  Well, read up and find out.

The movie opens with Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) screaming his ears out at a team of psychologists demanding to know why he is acting like an insane person.  We flash from here to the fictional town of Santa Mira, California.  More specifically, Santa Mira, California, a scant few days earlier, as Miles is called back to town due to a rash of people reporting mysterious ailments that seem to clear up as quick as they arrive.  McCarthy quietly turns in a performance for the ages, doing the Jimmy Stewart "everyman against impossible odds" role to perfection.  He's got a love interest in the form of ex-girlfriend Becky Driscoll (the lovely Dana Wynter - so lovely that her arrival in the movie is accompanied by tender, tinkly music) back in town after going through a divorce, and this plot manages to hold your attention without once getting annoying.  So then...the matter of those patients?

It starts off innocently enough, with Becky's cousin believing that her uncle isn't quite who he seems to be.  He looks the same, but something is off.  The glassy state and complete emotionlessness should be enough of a giveaway, but we have another hour left to kill.  The plot then moves to the strange case of Bennell's friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan) who has found a near carbon copy of himself in the closet.  Not soon thereafter, Bennell finds a similar copy of Becky in her father's basement.  Then, we get the dinner party, the trip to the greenhouse, and the discovery of the pods.

The term "Pod People" is definitely one that is familiar to horror fans.  Even I was more than aware of what they were many years ago, mainly due to the awesome level in the SNES masterpiece "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" and the host segments from the MST3K episode Giant Spider Invasion that pay homage to this film.  To a lot of people, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the "Pod People" movie, and that's where the plot leads us from this point on.  The exposition is spelled out to us in the form of a couple of helpful pod people, and it goes as follows: these alien seeds have been travelling through space for eons, finally finding Earth in the farmlands of Santa Mira.  They hatch, take on the form of a host, and fully inhabit said host's mind and memories when the host falls asleep.  And now that Bennell and Becky know about the plan, they're target #1 for assimilation.

In the final trimester, almost the entire town has been copied and taken over by the pods.  There are some admittedly tense sequences as the hero and the heroine try to escape the town with the denizens after them, trying to also run away from sleep all the while.  I know it might not sound like much, but it is.  The finale, with Bennell and Becky hiding away in an abandoned mine and spotting that gigantic farm full of farmers ready to deliver the pods all over the country is actually pretty dreadful.  And I mean that in the best way.

Throughout my Magellan-like travels watching a lot of these older horror films, I've noticed a recurring trend that the material is taken deadly serious.  There was no 1980s nostalgia to pull from in the 1950s, so that self-referential tone just isn't there, and thank the lord for the nighttime on that one.  More than anything else, though, this movie is carried by Kevin McCarthy.  While there's a large group of characters that we actually get to care about in this flick, this is his movie all the way and he delivers big time.  But it's not just him.  Wynter is also compelling in her own way, as is King Donovan as Jack and Carolyn Jones as his wife Teddy.  I recognized Jones right away, as she was Elvis Presley's costar in King Creole, easily the best movie that the King ever did throughout his long and nonillustrious film career.  But I digress.

I'm wracking my brain trying to think of a weakness this movie has, and the only area that I can think of where Invasion of the Body Snatchers even comes close to being weak is that some of the middle section drags.  The stretch that lasts from Jack finding his body double leading up to the big reveal of the discovery of the first pod doesn't move along quite as brisk as the rest of the film, but it seems like I say this sort of thing every week.  Everything else fires on all cylinders, from the music to the camera work to the script to the performances.  It even has an ending that wraps up nice and neatly in about 30 seconds flat, and I cannot tell you how grateful I was that this movie was made in 1956, because I was immediately struck by that sinking feeling that a modern movie would probably carry on for another 40 minutes of terminal boredom involving the military going back to Santa Mira to fight off the Podded-up locals.  Three cheers for simplicity and 80-minute running times!

*** 1/2 out of ****.  It's definitely worth a buy and a watch for all horror fans, whether or not you're all about the history of the genre or not.