Invasion of the Body Snatchers ***** (1956, Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones) – Classic Movie Review 676

‘You’re next, you’re next!’

The 1956 American sci-fi horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is produced by socially conscious Walter Wanger, and stars Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter. It is shot in black and white and Superscope in the film noir style. Thriller novelist and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring adapts the screenplay from Jack Finney’s 1954 sci-fi story The Body Snatchers

Director Don Siegel’s 1956 original black and white version of Jack Finney’s magazine serial story The Body Snatchers is a bona fide 50s sci-fi classic masterpiece, in which a little US town (the fictional Santa Mira in California) is taken over by unfeeling aliens. Their pods then hatch into living-dead doubles of members of the local population.

Kevin McCarthy stars as Dr Miles J Bennell who at first thinks his patients suffering from paranoid delusions that their friends and relatives are impostors. The doppelgängers are entirely credible because they can answer detailed questions about their victim’s lives. But eventually he finds his friends and patients are in fact strangely altered and emotionless.

He decides to investigate, but soon he and his girlfriend Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) are the only humans left in their once idyllic town. Director Siegel keeps the movie taut and dynamic and creates one of the screen’s creepiest, thought-provoking fantasies.

Daniel Mainwaring’s polished screenplay mixes suspense and scares with a metaphor about the insidious danger within of the Hollywood anti-communist witch-hunt of the shameful McCarthyist era in America, which landed many liberals and left-wingers in peril, and some in jail, in the last 40s and early 50s. Mainwaring himself had brushes with Hollywood witch-hunts.

However, Kevin McCarthy and Jack Finney denied that the story is a metaphor against McCarthyism and communism, seeing it as a straight thriller. Siegel however believed that the political references to Senator McCarthy and totalitarianism are inescapable, though he understandably tried not to emphasise them. In any case, not relying on effects or explosions, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a famous, notable example of intelligent sci-fi. Only $15,000 of the $416,911 budget was spent on special effects.

Ellsworth Fredericks shoots the film in black-and-white in a stylish, striking partly film noir style. It is released in Superscope but was originally shot in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio and Wanger protested at the use of Superscope, a laboratory process to create an anamorphic print from non-anamorphic material, when he saw the final cut in December 1955, saying the film lost sharpness and detail.

Film director Sam Peckinpah has a cameo as the meter reader Charlie Buckholtz and worked uncredited on the screenplay, though the extent of his contribution is disputed. He claimed that he had made major overhauls on the script but others said that his changes were limited to a few lines of dialogue. He also worked on the movie as a dialogue coach.

Don Siegel and Daniel Mainwaring were satisfied with the film as first shot, ending with Dr Miles Bennell screaming as truckloads of pods pass him by. But the studio Allied Artists Pictures insisted on adding a prologue and epilogue suggesting a more optimistic ending, with the story told mainly in flashback. It starts with Dr Bennell in custody in a hospital emergency ward telling a psychiatrist (Whit Bissell) his story, and ends as pods are found at a road accident, confirming his warning.

Mainwaring scripted the framing story and Siegel shot it on 16 September 1955, at the Allied Artists studio. Siegel recalled: ‘The film was nearly ruined by those in charge at Allied Artists who added a preface and ending that I don’t like. Wanger was very much against this as was I. However, he begged me to shoot it to protect the film, and I reluctantly consented.’

It was shot by cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks in 23 days between March 23 and April 27, 1955. Wanger wanted to film in Mill Valley, California, the town Jack Finney describes in his novel, but the location proved too costly and Siegel found locations resembling Mill Valley in the Los Angeles area, including Sierra Madre, Chatsworth, Glendale, Los Feliz, Bronson and Beachwood Canyons, which combined as Santa Mira in the film. Much of the film was shot in the Allied Artists studio in Hollywood.

Allied Artists Pictures released it as a double feature with Timeslip [The Atomic Man] or with Indestructible Man. It was a hit, taking $3 million at the box office.

It was remade in 1978 by Philip Kaufman as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and again in 1993 by Abel Ferrara as Body Snatchers, and a fourth adaptation, The Invasion, was made in 2007. It is also the basis of the 1998 The Faculty and the 2019 Assimilate.

Shocking: a colourised still from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Prompted by the first remake, the 1979 revised version of the first film was released, respecting the director’s original intentions by cutting the studio’s added footage at the start and finish in a movie that runs only 76 minutes instead of the 80 minutes of the original. The studio’s new footage was a vain and pointless attempt to lighten the sombre film’s tone with a false optimistic ending. The DVD offers both original black and white version and the colorised version.

The film was almost called The Body Snatchers after Jack Finney’s serial, but producer Walter Wanger decided it sounded too similar to the Val Lewton film The Body Snatcher (1945) and the studio Allied Artists Pictures eventually changed it to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Siegel had suggested Better Off Dead or Sleep No More, while Wanger had suggested Evil in the Night or World in Danger.

The Body Snatchers first edition book cover illustrated by John McDermott.

Finney’s story was originally serialised in Collier’s magazine in November–December 1954 and then published as a novel in 1955.

Walter Wanger may have been a socially conscious movie executive but he had something on his conscience. In 1951, he shot and wounded his wife Joan Bennett’s agent as he suspected they were having an affair. He was convicted, served a four-month sentence and returned to the movie business. Some might say he had something on his conscience. His career ended in 1963 with the turbulent production of Cleopatra, his last film.

The cast are Kevin McCarthy as Dr Miles Bennell, Dana Wynter as Becky Driscoll, King Donovan as Jack Belicec, Carolyn Jones as Theodora ‘Teddy’ Belicec, Larry Gates as Dr Dan Kauffman, Virginia Christine as Wilma Lentz, Ralph Dumke as Police Chief Nick Grivett, Kenneth Patterson as Stanley Driscoll, Guy Way as Officer Sam Janzek, Jean Willes as Nurse Sally Withers, Eileen Stevens as Anne Grimaldi, Beatrice Maude as Grandma Grimaldi, Whit Bissell (uncredited) as Dr Hill, Richard Deacon (uncredited) as Dr. Basset, Bobby Clark as Jimmy Grimaldi, Tom Fadden as Uncle Ira Lentz, Everett Glass as Dr. Ed Pursey, Dabbs Greer as Mac Lomax and Sam Peckinpah as Charlie Buckholtz, the gas meter reader.

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