February 6, 1956 – A classic of the sci-fi and paranoid film genres, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was released, tapping into multiple free-floating fears of enemies within by following a small town being taken over by creatures sprouted from mysterious vegetation growing unseen in the dark.
The name of this strange growth was “pod.” It was with some trepidation, then, that I heard several years ago that the major new listening device of the last several years was the Apple iPod. What was Steve Jobs trying to do to us? I wondered.
Then I remembered: It was Bill Gates, the geek with the roll-over-‘em instincts of a high-tech Capone, who was more likely to foist on the world an evil alien monstrosity than Steve Jobs, an overgrown adolescent given to exclaiming that things were “insanely great.” I breathed easy.
Not while watching this film, though. Made at close to the height of fears of a takeover of America by the Soviet Union (and less than a decade after Eastern Europe really was taken over by Stalin and his minions), it was also made at the same time Senator Joseph McCarthy was spreading fear and fostering needless conformity through his Communist witch-hunting. People have pointed to both phenomena as the real subject of this thriller.
It was also within a decade of a crash landing in Roswell, New Mexico of what the Air Force reported was a weather balloon and what conspiracy-mongers of a certain bent insisted was a UFO. (I discovered from reading Christopher Buckley’s hilarious satire Little Green Men that Bill Clinton’s old Arkansas buddy, Webster Hubbell, was given two mandates by the new President when he took his post in the Attorney-General’s office: “One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?”)
What historian Richard Hofstadter called The Paranoid Style in American Politics found ample seed in the 1950s, then—as well as our own.
The original source material was The Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney, most famous for the time-travel classic Time and Again. Depending on your politics or your general view of life, Finney was either being truthful or disingenuous when he denied any political intent in his book, claiming it was just meant to be popular entertainment.
No matter. Sometimes an author’s creation is so original that it captures the hopes and fears of other times besides the ones for which he or she writes.
Such was the case with this B-movie—helped in no small measure by crisp direction from Don Siegel.
Over the course of his 49-year career in movies, Siegel probably became best known for his taut, no-nonsense work in sci-fi, war and cop movies, and his influence can still be seen in the quick, economically shot films of his star and protégé, Clint Eastwood.
But I was really pleased to find out that this longtime Hollywood vet started his career as – are you ready?—a film librarian. (I did not learn this from the DVD I watched of his film a few months ago – though that had some nice features, including an interview from about 20 years ago with McCarthy.)
Years later, a CD of Finney’s 1955 novel was narrated by Kristoffer Tabori.
The hero of the film, Dr. Miles Bennell, was played by Kevin McCarthy, the younger brother of the fine novelist-essayist-memoirist Mary McCarthy. His love interest was played by Dana Wynter, a German-British actress who a few years later played the desperately scheming heroine Kate Croy in the Playhouse 90 adaptation of Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.
(This latter role of Wynter’s was later taken up by Helena Bonham-Carter in a 1997 movie. One of my friends – and he knows who he is! – has classified HB-C as a member of what he calls his “DHBBs” – i.e., Dark-Haired British Beauties. He’s so proud of this acronym that I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to trademark it yet.)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is also unique for spawning (you think I could resist that word?) three sequels, including one that I think measures up close well to the original. Although last year’s Nicole Kidman-Daniel Craig film The Invasion was generally faulted for lacking subtlety (even the title, a truncated version of the original, was probably a tipoff of something gone awry), the 1993 Gabrielle Anwar-Meg Tilly flick, Body Snatchers, has its share of adherents. (Not having seen it, I’m not one of them.)
The first version of this now-classic story that I saw, however, was not Siegel’s black-and-white thriller set in the small-town one of Santa Mira, but Philip Kaufman’s color remake, filmed in San Francisco in 1978. Siegel and McCarthy have cameos here—a neat little tip of the hat – but Kaufman has updated it in a way that still has not lost its salience and urgency 30 years later.
Kaufman, spotlighting a celebrity psychotherapist-author played by Leonard Nimoy, captured the emptiness of what Tom Wolfe christened “The Me Decade” – an age that gave rise to EST, Scientology, and all manner of other cults and psychobabble.
This time, the threat to mind and soul comes not from a political ideology that stamps out individuality, but from people’s desire to eradicate all psychic pain through any substance available, no matter what the cost to whatever makes them human – a possibility forecast in the soma of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, and now realized in Prozac and all the other products created by the pharmaceutical industry.
(A broad-ranging examination of the latter has just appeared: Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation, by Charles Barber. I met Charlie, a one-time Englewood resident, at a writers’ workshop some years ago, and am looking forward to reading his new book.)
I particularly enjoyed Jeff Goldblum as Donald Sutherland’s hilariously geeky friend. And the ending is a powerhouse – not only, perhaps, a retrospective condemnation of the McCarthy-era practice of “naming names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but also a return to the mood, if not the actual events, of Siegel’s original downbeat ending, one that his studio forced him to change.
It was the Kaufman remake that inspired one of my all-time favorite Saturday Night Live skits, “Invasion of the Brain Snatchers,” first aired on April 19, 1980—not only the tail-end of the show’s original golden age, but also the beginning of the Reagan Era in America. In this spoof, diehard liberals suddenly began mouthing the worst clichés of the Reagan candidacy, e.g., “Unleash the oil companies!”
(Well, we did. And where did that get us? Still heavily oil dependent, only now with less oil to go around than before.)
There’s a legend that one of the stars of the 1956 Invasion, Carolyn Jones, was the victim of a practical joke in which some members of the cast or crew left a dummy “pod” on the bed in her trailer.
It sounds like something that the character she would later play on The Addams Family, Morticia, would find mildly intriguing. But supposedly, the actress ran screaming from her trailer in terror.
How like the main characters (including her own) in this great film – and how like audiences in all the years since this classic was sprung on an all-too-ready public.
The name of this strange growth was “pod.” It was with some trepidation, then, that I heard several years ago that the major new listening device of the last several years was the Apple iPod. What was Steve Jobs trying to do to us? I wondered.
Then I remembered: It was Bill Gates, the geek with the roll-over-‘em instincts of a high-tech Capone, who was more likely to foist on the world an evil alien monstrosity than Steve Jobs, an overgrown adolescent given to exclaiming that things were “insanely great.” I breathed easy.
Not while watching this film, though. Made at close to the height of fears of a takeover of America by the Soviet Union (and less than a decade after Eastern Europe really was taken over by Stalin and his minions), it was also made at the same time Senator Joseph McCarthy was spreading fear and fostering needless conformity through his Communist witch-hunting. People have pointed to both phenomena as the real subject of this thriller.
It was also within a decade of a crash landing in Roswell, New Mexico of what the Air Force reported was a weather balloon and what conspiracy-mongers of a certain bent insisted was a UFO. (I discovered from reading Christopher Buckley’s hilarious satire Little Green Men that Bill Clinton’s old Arkansas buddy, Webster Hubbell, was given two mandates by the new President when he took his post in the Attorney-General’s office: “One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?”)
What historian Richard Hofstadter called The Paranoid Style in American Politics found ample seed in the 1950s, then—as well as our own.
The original source material was The Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney, most famous for the time-travel classic Time and Again. Depending on your politics or your general view of life, Finney was either being truthful or disingenuous when he denied any political intent in his book, claiming it was just meant to be popular entertainment.
No matter. Sometimes an author’s creation is so original that it captures the hopes and fears of other times besides the ones for which he or she writes.
Such was the case with this B-movie—helped in no small measure by crisp direction from Don Siegel.
Over the course of his 49-year career in movies, Siegel probably became best known for his taut, no-nonsense work in sci-fi, war and cop movies, and his influence can still be seen in the quick, economically shot films of his star and protégé, Clint Eastwood.
But I was really pleased to find out that this longtime Hollywood vet started his career as – are you ready?—a film librarian. (I did not learn this from the DVD I watched of his film a few months ago – though that had some nice features, including an interview from about 20 years ago with McCarthy.)
Years later, a CD of Finney’s 1955 novel was narrated by Kristoffer Tabori.
The hero of the film, Dr. Miles Bennell, was played by Kevin McCarthy, the younger brother of the fine novelist-essayist-memoirist Mary McCarthy. His love interest was played by Dana Wynter, a German-British actress who a few years later played the desperately scheming heroine Kate Croy in the Playhouse 90 adaptation of Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.
(This latter role of Wynter’s was later taken up by Helena Bonham-Carter in a 1997 movie. One of my friends – and he knows who he is! – has classified HB-C as a member of what he calls his “DHBBs” – i.e., Dark-Haired British Beauties. He’s so proud of this acronym that I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to trademark it yet.)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is also unique for spawning (you think I could resist that word?) three sequels, including one that I think measures up close well to the original. Although last year’s Nicole Kidman-Daniel Craig film The Invasion was generally faulted for lacking subtlety (even the title, a truncated version of the original, was probably a tipoff of something gone awry), the 1993 Gabrielle Anwar-Meg Tilly flick, Body Snatchers, has its share of adherents. (Not having seen it, I’m not one of them.)
The first version of this now-classic story that I saw, however, was not Siegel’s black-and-white thriller set in the small-town one of Santa Mira, but Philip Kaufman’s color remake, filmed in San Francisco in 1978. Siegel and McCarthy have cameos here—a neat little tip of the hat – but Kaufman has updated it in a way that still has not lost its salience and urgency 30 years later.
Kaufman, spotlighting a celebrity psychotherapist-author played by Leonard Nimoy, captured the emptiness of what Tom Wolfe christened “The Me Decade” – an age that gave rise to EST, Scientology, and all manner of other cults and psychobabble.
This time, the threat to mind and soul comes not from a political ideology that stamps out individuality, but from people’s desire to eradicate all psychic pain through any substance available, no matter what the cost to whatever makes them human – a possibility forecast in the soma of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, and now realized in Prozac and all the other products created by the pharmaceutical industry.
(A broad-ranging examination of the latter has just appeared: Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation, by Charles Barber. I met Charlie, a one-time Englewood resident, at a writers’ workshop some years ago, and am looking forward to reading his new book.)
I particularly enjoyed Jeff Goldblum as Donald Sutherland’s hilariously geeky friend. And the ending is a powerhouse – not only, perhaps, a retrospective condemnation of the McCarthy-era practice of “naming names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but also a return to the mood, if not the actual events, of Siegel’s original downbeat ending, one that his studio forced him to change.
It was the Kaufman remake that inspired one of my all-time favorite Saturday Night Live skits, “Invasion of the Brain Snatchers,” first aired on April 19, 1980—not only the tail-end of the show’s original golden age, but also the beginning of the Reagan Era in America. In this spoof, diehard liberals suddenly began mouthing the worst clichés of the Reagan candidacy, e.g., “Unleash the oil companies!”
(Well, we did. And where did that get us? Still heavily oil dependent, only now with less oil to go around than before.)
There’s a legend that one of the stars of the 1956 Invasion, Carolyn Jones, was the victim of a practical joke in which some members of the cast or crew left a dummy “pod” on the bed in her trailer.
It sounds like something that the character she would later play on The Addams Family, Morticia, would find mildly intriguing. But supposedly, the actress ran screaming from her trailer in terror.
How like the main characters (including her own) in this great film – and how like audiences in all the years since this classic was sprung on an all-too-ready public.
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