Minority View: Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Donald Siegel review

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Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a sci-fi horror film that has been remade or adapted more than once but it provides evidence that even ‘˜fantasies' don't owe only to the imagination but are prompted by historical circumstances. When the circumstances are overcome, the theme - though nominally ‘˜fantastic' - loses its immediacy and all its technical advantages cannot rescue the remake.

Siegel's film uses a set of motifs that proliferated in the fifties and sixties - the idea of the ‘˜zombie' and the notion that a person's soul - as embodied in his/her capacity to feel could be taken away. The zombie perhaps has its origins in cinema in The White Zombie (1932) but both this film and the more famous one by Jacques Tourneur - I Walked With a Zombie (1943) - are different from the later films in as much as they are about individual zombies rather than with ‘˜zombism' as a spreading infection. While zombism as a spreading infection may have its apogee in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), there are related notions that throw light on its significance. ‘˜Robbing a person of his/ her soul' and make him/her follow dictate is associated with the technique of brainwashing in Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), directly attributed to the Soviet Union - with Pavlov's psychiatric experiments as justification. The same motif is carried through into Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965) in which people become listless under communism because ‘˜feeling' is frowned upon by the party. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers a mysterious extra-terrestrial organism sets about replicating people in all their actual detail but with the singular incapacity to feel. This may be reasonably interpreted as owing to Cold War paranoia which not only presented the communists as unfeeling but also propagated the belief that the Soviet Union intended to take over the world - or infect humankind with the incapacity to feel, as Hollywood might have phrased it.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers begins when the police in a small town encounter and apprehend a person in intense hysteria. Dr Miles J Bennel is from another nearby town and he is terrified by some strange experiences he has just undergone. The police listen to his story and the film uses it to reveal everything to the audience in flashback. The story begins when Dr Bennel returns from a trip to find something strange going on.  Everything looks the same but it is still different. A busy coffee shop is inexplicably shut down and a large number of people have cancelled their appointments with him. The first symptom that he inspects personally pertains to an old friend who seems to imagine that her uncle is someone else - although he is identical in every way to him. Shortly thereafter a little boy imagines that his mother is an impostor. Most extraordinarily, another friend named Jack Belicek and his wife find a strange body in their home - a curiously unformed body appearing to be in the process of forming because it has no fingerprints and its face looks incomplete. The face on the body seems nonetheless familiar and it could be forming into Jack Belicek. Dr Bennel has a sweetheart named Betty Driscol and the two investigate the happenings together but Dr Bennel also learns that, meanwhile, both the people believing that their dear ones were impostors are now regretting their unfounded fears.

The rest of the film does not bear recounting in detail but Dr Bennel and Betty discover that there are some giant pods of some kind that are capable of replicating people when they sleep and the minds and memories of the original people are stolen by the ‘˜replicants'. The only difference is that unlike humans, the replicants cannot feel. People are safe as long as they remain awake but when they fall asleep, they are snatched. Soon virtually everyone in town is a replicant and they are all actively involved in the distribution of giant pods. The replicants, having all the other mental faculties of ordinary people, soon try to persuade Dr Bennel and Betty Driscol to fall asleep and surrender to the inevitable but the two try to give the rest of the town the slip by pretending to have become replicants. Unfortunately, Betty sees a dog almost run over on the street and her gasp of alarm betrays her as a human being.

The film succeeds brilliantly because it is so simple in its conception, with virtually no evidence of special effects of any kind. The replicants behave like human beings but the film still manages to infuse every situation with terror. Particularly impressive is a morning scene in the town square seen from a window by Dr Bennel and Betty Driscol. Everyone is going about his or her business but it is far too early for so many people to be about. More singularly, their random movements soon begin to acquire purposefulness - as though they were all actually serving a single cause and this cause becomes apparent when a truck arrives with a load of pods and the ‘˜people' grab hold of a pod each, and swiftly disperse.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was produced when the country was in an intense political hysteria - with Senator McCarthy naming people as ‘˜communists' almost arbitrarily. While the film may be culpable for feeding on this hysteria, it is still an astonishing piece of filmmaking for being able to suggest so much through means that are so modest.