Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a
1956 science fiction film based on the novel
The Body Snatchers by
Jack Finney (originally serialized in
Colliers Magazine in
1954). It stars
Kevin
McCarthy,
Dana Wynter, King Donovan,
and
Carolyn Jones. The
screenplay was adapted from Finney's novel by
Daniel Mainwaring, along with an
uncredited Richard Collins, and was directed by
Don Siegel.
In 1993,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was selected for
preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the
Library of
Congress
as being "culturally, historically, or
aesthetically significant". In June 2008, the
American Film Institute revealed its
"Ten top Ten" — the best ten films in ten "classic" American film
genres — after polling over 1,500 people from the creative
community.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was acknowledged
as the ninth best film in the science fiction genre.
The film has been remade three times.
Plot
Set in the
fictional town of Santa Mira, California (actually shot in Sierra
Madre
), the plot centers on Dr. Miles Bennell (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 divorceé
Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), who tells him that her cousin, Wilma,
has this same strange fear about Uncle Ira.
Assured at first by the town psychiatrist Dr. Dan Kaufman (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 about the alien force which has overrun Santa
Mira to the passing motorists and (in a moment that is considered a
breaking of the Fourth Wall) looks into
the camera and yells, "They're here already! You're next! You're
next!"
Production
Originally, producer Walter Wanger and
director Don Siegel wanted to shoot Invasion of the Body
Snatchers on location in Jack Finney's model for Santa Mira,
Mill
Valley
, just north of San Francisco
. In the first week of January 1955, Siegel,
Wanger, and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring visited Finney to talk
about the film version and to take a look at Mill Valley.
The
location proved to be too expensive and Siegel and some Allied
Artists executives found locations resembling Mill Valley in Sierra
Madre, Chatsworth
, Glendale
, the Los
Feliz
neighborhood and in Bronson
and Beachwood Canyons. However, much of the
film was shot in the Allied Artists studio on the east side of
Hollywood
. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was
originally budgeted for a 24-day schedule at
USD
$454,864 and the studio asked Wanger to cut the budget
significantly. The producer proposed a shooting schedule of 20 days
and a budget of $350,000.
Casting
Initially, Wanger considered
Gig Young,
Dick Powell,
Joseph Cotten and several others for the role
of Miles. For Becky, he thought of casting
Anne Bancroft,
Donna
Reed,
Kim Hunter,
Vera Miles and others. With the lower budget,
Wanger had to abandon these choices and cast
Richard Kiley, who had just starred in
Phoenix City Story for Allied Artists. Kiley turned the
role down and Wanger cast two relative newcomers in the lead roles:
Kevin McCarthy, who had just starred in Siegel's
Annapolis
Story, and Dana Wynter, who had done several major dramatic
roles on television but had not done a film.
Principal photography
The film was shot in 23 days between March 23, 1955 and April 18,
1955. The cast and crew worked a six-day week with only Sundays
off. The production went over schedule by three days because of
night-for-night shooting that Siegel wanted. The final budget was
$382,190. When released in 1956, the movie made over $1 million in
its first month. In 1956 alone, the movie made over $2.5 million in
the USA. When the British issue took place in late 1956, the film
made over a half million dollars in ticket sales.
Post-production
The project was originally called,
The Body Snatchers
after the Finney serial. However, Wanger wanted to avoid confusion
with the
Val Lewton 1945 horror film with a very
similar title. The producer was unable to come up with a title and
accepted the studio's choice,
They Come from Another World
that was assigned in summer 1955. Siegel protested this title and
suggest two alternatives:
Better Off Dead and
Sleep No
More, while Wanger offered
Evil in the Night and
World in Danger. None of these were chosen as the studio
finally settled on
Invasion of the Body Snatchers in late
1955.
Wanger saw the final cut in December 1955 and protested the use of
the Superscope format. Its use had been a part of the early plans
for the film, but the first print was not made until December.
Wanger felt that the film lost sharpness and detail. Siegel had
originally shot
Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the
1.85:1 aspect
ratio. Superscope was a post-production lab process designed to
create an anamorphic print that would be projected at an aspect
ratio of 2.00:1.
The studio scheduled three previews for the film on the last days
of June and the first day of July 1955. According to Wanger's memos
at the time, the previews were successful. However, later reports
by Mainwaring and Siegel contradict this, claiming that audiences
could not follow the film and laughed in the wrong places. In
response, the studio removed much of the film's humor, "humanity"
and "quality," according to Wanger. He scheduled another preview in
mid-August that did not go well. The studio decided to change the
film's title to a more conventional science fiction one. In later
interviews, Siegel pointed out that it was studio policy not to mix
humor with horror.
When the film was released nationally in early 1956, many theatres
displayed several of the pods (made of paper) at theatre lobbies
and entrances along with large lifelike black and white cutouts of
McCarthy and Wynter running frantically away from a crowd.
Original intended ending
Both Siegel and Mainwaring were satisfied with the film as shot. It
was originally intended to end with Miles screaming hysterically as
truckloads of pods pass him by. 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
which is thus told mainly in flashback. In this version the movie
begins with Bennell in a hospital emergency room where he might be
sent to an
insane asylum. He then
tells a doctor (Whit Bissell) his story. 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. Mainwaring
scripted this framing story and Siegel shot it on September 16,
1955 at Allied Artists.
Wanger wanted to add a variety of speeches and prefaces. He
suggested a voice-over introduction for Miles. While the film was
being shot, Wanger tried to get permission in England to use a
Winston Churchill quotation as a
preface to the film. The producer also tried to get
Orson Welles to voice the preface and a trailer
for the film. He wrote speeches for Welles' opening on June 15,
1955 and spent considerable time trying to convince Welles to do
it, but was unsuccessful. Wanger considered science fiction author
Ray Bradbury instead but this also did
not happen. Mainwaring eventually wrote the voice-over narration
himself.The shorter version of the film was often rerun late at
night on TV stations and one PBS showing in 1988. The full
theatrical version was not widely released until 1978 when a remake
was produced starring Donald Sutherland.
Reaction
Invasion of the Body Snatchers holds a 100 percent "fresh"
rating at
Rotten Tomatoes. In recent
years, critics have hailed the film as a "genuine SF classic" and
one of the "most resonant" and "one of the simplest" of the genre.
The
BBC wrote, "The sense of post-war,
anti-communist paranoia is acute, as is the temptation to view the
film as a metaphor for the tyranny of the McCarthy era."
Legacy
In 1993,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was selected for
preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the
Library of
Congress as being "culturally, historically, or
aesthetically significant". In June 2008, the
American Film Institute revealed its
"Ten top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film
genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was acknowledged as the
ninth best film in the science fiction genre.
Time included
Invasion of the Body
Snatchers on their list of 100 all-time best films, the top 10
1950s Sci-Fi Movies, and Top 25 Horror Films.
Themes
The film
has been read as both an allegory for the loss of personal autonomy
in the Soviet
Union
, as an allegory of Cold War
paranoia, and as an indictment of the damage to the human
personality caused by reductionist modern ideologies of Right and
Left. It has also been read, however, as a metaphor of
alienation in modern mass civilization, or a covert indictment of
McCarthyism.
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.
In his autobiography, "I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not
History,"
Walter Mirisch writes:
"People began to read meanings into pictures that were never
intended.
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an example
of that. I remember reading a magazine article arguing that the
picture was intended as an allegory about the communist
infiltration of America. From personal knowledge, neither Walter
Wanger nor Don Siegel, who directed it, nor Dan Mainwaring, who
wrote the script nor the original author Jack Finney, nor myself
saw it as anything other than a thriller, pure and simple."
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