Invasion of the Body Snatchers (

1956

) ½

When Howard Hawks was adapting John Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? to the big screen, he made some pretty drastic changes to the source material. This was not the result of studio pressure (Hawks was Hollywood royalty and could make whatever damn picture he wanted to, within reason), or a consequence of books being allowed more leeway when it comes to sex and violence. Rather, Hawks had to change the story to fit the kind of film he wanted to make. Hawks liked stories about harmonious groups, composed of individuals who set aside their differences to work together as a team. There may be disagreement and conflict among the group’s members, but usually, the mutual respect will steer them through these rough patches with relatively little difficulty. It’s a compromise between the faceless conformity of collectivism and the free-for-all of individualism and forms a core part of the better world Hawks was looking to create onscreen. Obviously, such a team does not work in a setting with an alien monster that can flawlessly impersonate any one teammate! So the shapeshifting alien of Campbell’s novel had to go and was in turn replaced with a hulking brute bent on drinking blood and conquering the world. Compromises are a fact of life when dealing with cinematic adaptations, and when the result is something as lovely as The Thing from Another World (1951) I find it hard to complain too loudly, especially when we would get a more faithful adaptation of the same story thirty years later in the form of The Thing (1982). Still, the premise of Campbell’s story seems a perfect fit for the rampant paranoia and espionage that characterized the early years of the cold war (impressive since it was first published in 1938), and it would be a shame if it had no representation whatsoever in 1950s sci-fi. Fortunately for movie lovers everywhere, the core ideas of Cambell's story were borrowed by Jack Finney and that story was adapted into today's film, perhaps the most perfect example of 1950s sci-fi horror.

Indeed, Invasion of the Body Snatchers might even have an advantage over The Thing from Another World (1951), just thanks to the nature of its setting. The earlier film was set in the Arctic Circle, a location as desolate and as alien to viewers as any place on earth, while Santa Mira, the fictional small town where Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes place, would be instantly familiar to any American audience. In 1956, most Americans lived in a town that wasn't all that different from Santa Mira. Even those crowded into the great cities or scattered across remote farms and frontiers would be familiar with the Santa Miras of the world through television shows like I Love Lucy or Father Knows Best. The film unfolds in a universe of tree-lined streets, cardigan sweaters, white picket fences, and wood-paneled station wagons. This flood of post-war Americana can make a modern viewer, more accustomed to the parodies and deconstructions of the era than the era itself, suspect the film is a satire of its time and place. This is no parody or satire though, it's meant to be the world outside your window. Santa Mira's pastoral splendor is supposed to feel familiar but so is the feeling of paranoia that darkens the edges of the film. Yes, Santa Mira is the kind of place where an elderly man smokes his pipe while mowing his lawn. But it is also the kind of place where “worry about what’s going on in the world” could reasonably spark an epidemic of mass hysteria. This is the world that the audience lived in, a world that desperately hides its fear of communist infiltration, nuclear Armageddon, and McCarthyite witch hunts, behind a screen of folksy wholesomeness. Modern viewers can only imagine the dual feelings of familiarity and vague menace that the landscape must have had on its initial audience, yet even echoing across six decades the film still retains a great deal of power to shock and startle.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers begins with Dr. Miles Bennell returning home from a medical convention in a nearby city. In his absence, the small town of Santa Mira, where he is a general practitioner, experienced a bizarre epidemic of hysteria cases. People all over the town of all ages and walks of life began to suspect that their loved ones were somehow, against all logic, impostors. Bennell is mostly unconcerned about the psychological cases and oblivious to the various small ways in which the town has changed in his brief absence. He spends most of his time courting another new arrival to the town: Becky Driscoll, an old flame who recently divorced her husband and moved back to Santa Mira. One night he and Becky are called away from a date by their friends Jack and Teddy Belicec who have discovered a featureless corpse, devoid of fingerprints, birth-marks, or any other distinguishing features but that bears a general resemblance (height, weight, hair color, etc.) to Jack Belicec himself. Belicec, a pulp writer by trade, is hesitant about calling the police as such an action would remove him from the most exciting mystery he's ever been directly involved in. The Belicec's resolve to take turns watching the body that night, if nothing happens they'll phone the police in the morning. Miles drives Becky back home before turning in himself, only to be woken up a few hours later by a hysterical call from Teddy Belicec who claims to have seen the featureless corpse transforming into Jack. As soon as the Belicecs are safe at his house, Miles rushes off to Becky's to fetch her. He discovers a doppelganger of Becky taking form in her basement, and it’s all he can do to keep it together long enough to drag the real Becky out of her bed and into his car. The group summons Dan Kaufman, the town's resident psychologist, who, with the wave of his hands and the pronouncement of 'mass hysteria', dispels the bizarre events of the night. It turns out there was nobody in Becky's basement, just a pile of old clothes, and the only real mystery is the diapering corpse from the Belicec's house.

The initial resistance to Kaufman’s explanation gives way to grateful acceptance that nothing out of the ordinary is going on, and the quartet prepares to settle back into their normal small-town lifestyles. However, all is not what it seems. Sure, on the surface it’s downright crazy to think that something is producing carbon-copy replacements of the town’s inhabitants but if this were the case then wouldn’t it follow that covering up the disappearances and replacements of people by their doppelgangers would be a snap. All you would need is to replace a few key people: police, reporters, doctors, switchboard operators, and politicians and the whole town would be at your mercy. If the copies are so good that the only way to identify them is the nagging uncertainty of intimate or family member then the whole town could be taken over before anyone realized what was happening. Hell, given enough time the whole world would be in danger. Sure, it sounds crazy but when you find a gigantic seedpod growing in your garden like Miles does when Becky and the Belicec’s are gathered together for a barbecue at his place, you’d start to put the pieces together too. The couples split up, figuring taking two separate cars will maximize their chance at making a successful getaway from the pod-controlled town. Obviously, the pod people are not going to make this easy for them. The Belicecs are taken out off-screen, leaving Miles and Becky to make a hasty exit from town on foot with seemingly the entire population of Santa Mira in close pursuit.

Of special notice is the sequence where the town is putting on a show of normalcy, all the pod people going about their daily routines as if they are not eldritch terrors from outer space until the last few outsiders get on a bus and leave. At that point the whole town center turns into an anthill of organized activity, each pod instantly and instinctually going about their roles. All their effort is directed towards producing more pods and replacing more people. It's scenes like this, more than anything, that hammer home the enormity of the threat these pods pose to mankind. The enemy is undetectable, perfectly coordinated, and devoting 100% of its energy and resources to expanding and replacing mankind. Sure, they lack the superior firepower of the aliens from War of the Worlds (1953) that could turn whole army groups to ash and skeletons, but if anything, they pose an even greater threat in spite of that. A wiz-bang superweapon could conceivably penetrate the Martian’s force-fields or disrupt their killer heat rays, but how do you fight against an infestation like the pod people? One where the last human being could conceivably be unaware than any invasion had taken place at all until he too was assimilated into the hive mind. Even if the authorities were warned and carpet-bombed the whole region (killing every pod and non-pod person, which would be the only way to possibly stop the infestation), how could you ever be sure you got them all? Even a victory over the pods promises a world of near-constant paranoia, wondering if those closest to you have been replaced by an inhuman enemy.

It bears noting that The Invasion of the Body Snatchers that we got is a mangled, compromised version. Originally the film was supposed to begin with Miles returning to Santa Mira after his medical conference, and end with his freak out on the highway screaming “Look, you fools, you're in danger! Can't you see?! They're after you! They're after all of us! Our wives, our children, everyone! THEY'RE HERE, ALREADY! YOU'RE NEXT!” Leaving us to wonder, would anyone believe him and his impossible story of impersonators from outer space? Wouldn’t it be much more likely for everyone to simply denounce him as a mad-man and move on with their lives, unaware of the existential threat that is gradually replacing them? It’s a great ending, but like The Bad Seed (1956) it’s one that was way too dark and twisted for the Hollywood of the 1950s to make. At least the compromise ending here is better than the one they shoved into The Bad Seed (1956), balanced as it is by a prologue that shows Miles being pulled into an insane asylum. The doctors there ask him his story, but show little sign of believing a word of it. It’s only a lucky break that they hear of a truck carrying giant seed pods crashing on the highway and put two and two together. At least we get to see Miles being treated like a lunatic before the unearned and highly improbably happy ending comes in. In a perfect world, this coda and prologue wouldn’t be attached to this film, but unfortunately making commercial art sometimes requires sacrifices of integrity and message. At least this form of studio meddling is easily ignored, just skip the first and last scenes and you’ll have the film more or less the way that Don Seigel and the screenwriters intended. Given the modern trend of ordering re-shoots that can subtly transform the tone and style of a film (Fantastic Four (2015), Justice League (2017), Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) to name a few), let's count ourselves lucky that studio heads in the 1950s contented themselves with just slapping another scene onto the end of a controversial film and calling it a day. Still, this imperfection keeps me from awarding Invasion of the Body Snatchers the full five stars it would otherwise earn handily. That said, even the ending we got is better than the ending of the original novel, where the pods just give up and go home because humans are more trouble than they are worth.

As I mentioned in my review of They Live (1988), Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the rare movie that remains completely apolitical itself but opens itself up to a myriad of political readings. It is perfectly possible to read the film as a warning about the imminent danger of communist infiltration or the similarly menacing threat of McCarthyite Red Scares. Yet this makes no sense, even in the historical context of the film. The Army McCarthy hearings that torpedoed the senator’s legitimacy were in 1954, two years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Hell, the fear of communist subversion was largely fading from the minds of most Americans even before that. That is not to say that Americans of the mid-1950s were less afraid, they did have a little thing called nuclear holocaust to keep them up at night. Invasion of the Body Snatchers could still work as a parable for those times, but few at the time chose to see it that way. Indeed, most of the movie’s framing as a tale of cold war paranoia would come from later criticism that lumped it in with the earlier period, because it’s very rare to find a film historian who cares as much for history as he does for film. Invasion of the Body Snatchers works in this framework, not because of any authorial intention, but because it hits a fundamental truth. The pods work as communist agents and McCarthyite witch hunters but they could just as easily be religious fanatics or political terrorists. Indeed, the pods serve as a great stand-in for anything that takes human beings and tries to make them into something less than human, as all ideologies invariably seek to do. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, insofar as it could be said to have a message, has a very simple one: Individuals have some basic worth and anything that seeks to subvert that is monstrous, whatever its noble intentions may be.