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Invasion of the Body Snatchers

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Revision as of 03:20, 5 February 2008 by WillOakland (talk | contribs) (trivia lists suck)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) This article is about the 1956 film. For the 1978 remake, see Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 film). 1956 film
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
File:Invasion of the body snatchers.jpg
Directed byDon Siegel
Written byNovel:
Jack Finney
Screenplay:
Daniel Mainwaring
Uncredited:
Richard Collins
Produced byWalter Wanger
StarringKevin McCarthy
Dana Wynter
King Donovan
Carolyn Jones
Larry Gates
Distributed byAllied Artists Pictures Corporation
Release date1956
Running time80 min.
Country United States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$417,000

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 science fiction film. It stars Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones and is based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (originally serialized in Colliers Magazine in 1954). The film has been remade three times and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. A somewhat similar plot appeared in the 1958 film, I Married A Monster From Outer Space.

The screenplay was adapted from Finney's novel by Daniel Mainwaring (who also wrote the film noir classic Out of the Past), along with an uncredited Richard Collins. It was directed by Don Siegel, who went on to make The Killers and Dirty Harry.

Plot

Set in the fictional town of Santa Mira, California (actually shot in Sierra Madre, a town east of Pasadena), the plot centers on Dr. Miles Bennell (played by Kevin McCarthy), a local doctor, who finds a rash of patients accusing their loved ones of being impostors. Another patient is a former sweetheart of his; recent divorcee Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), who tells him that her cousin has this same strange fear.

Assured at first by the town psychiatrist (Dr. Dan Kaufman, played by Larry Gates) that the cases are nothing but "epidemic mass hysteria," Bennell soon discovers, with the help of his friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan), that the townspeople are in fact being replaced by simulations grown from plantlike pods; perfect physical duplicates who kill and dispose of their human victims. The Pod People are indistinguishable from normal people, except for their utter lack of emotion. The pod people work together to secretly spread more pods—which grew from "seeds drifting through space for years"—in order to replace the entire human race.

The film climaxes with Bennell and Driscoll attempting to escape the pod people, intending to warn the rest of humanity. They hide; Driscoll falls asleep and is subverted. With the pod people close behind, a seemingly crazed Bennell runs onto the highway frantically screaming of the alien force which has overrun Santa Mira to the passing motorists and (in a moment that could almost be considered a breaking of the 4th wall) looks into the camera and yells, "They're here already! You're next!"

The film was originally intended to end with Bennell screaming hysterically as truckloads of pods pass him by but the studio, wary of such a pessimistic conclusion, insisted on adding a prologue and epilogue to the movie that suggested a more optimistic outcome to the story. In this version the movie begins with Bennell about to be sent to an insane asylum. He then tells the police his story in flashback. In the closing scene, pods are discovered at a highway accident, thus confirming his warning. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is notified, though it is left ambiguous whether they intervene in time to save the Earth. These scenes were deleted in a 1979 re-release after the first remake appeared, paring the movie down to 76 minutes.

Themes

The film has been read as both an allegory for the perceived loss of personal autonomy in the Soviet Union by the U.S. and as an indictment of McCarthyist paranoia about Communism during the early stages of the Cold War.

Despite the general agreement among film critics regarding these political connotations of the film, lead actor Kevin McCarthy said in an interview included on the 1998 DVD release that he felt no political allegory was intended. The interviewer stated that he had spoken with the author of the original novel, Jack Finney, who also professed to have intended no specific political allegory in the work.

Related works

External links


Films directed by Don Siegel
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