Invasion of the Body Snatchers 9781838713386, 9781844572786

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Acknowledgments I wish to thank, first of all, Rebecca Barden at the British Film Institute for her support and patience, without which this book would not have been finished. Sophia Contento at the BFI supplied invaluable help with the digital frame captures and Belinda Latchford steered the book through production. The anonymous reviewers of my initial proposal provided insightful comments and suggestions, as did the readers of the manuscript, all of which I hope are reflected herein. Murray Pomerance promptly produced Midge’s bra description from Vertigo. Dorinda Hartman, Assistant Archivist, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society, which houses the Walter Wanger manuscript collection, and Kristine Kreuger, National Film Information Service, Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California, vouchsafed invaluable research assistance. In the town of Sierra Madre, Andy Bencosme of Century 21 and Victor Sedaros, building owner, allowed me access to the roof of the real-estate building to photograph Kersting Court; Debbie R. Henderson, Associate Librarian and Archivist of the Sierre Madre Historical Archives at the Sierra Madre Public Library, shared her film production file with me; and Bill Coburn, Executive Director of the Sierra Madre Chamber of Commerce, showed me material relating to the locations in the town used in the film. Larry Bodkin, President of White Rock Beverage Company, kindly granted permission to reproduce the image of the White Rock Girl (© White Rock Beverage Company), and Bob Beckerer and John Boucher of the White Rock Collectors Association provided me with a digitised copy of the logo.

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Introduction Upon its long-delayed release on 5 February 1956, on a double bill with the British science fiction thriller The Atomic Man (1955), Walter Wanger’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel and released through Allied Artists, hardly received the attention it has subsequently garnered. Both the studio and the reviewing press perceived it as another in the cycle of B science fiction and horror movies that proliferated at the time. Many of the major newspapers, such as the New York Times, did not even bother to review the film. ‘D. A.’ in the Los Angeles Times opined that it starts strong, with ‘pace, wit, suspense and some sharp acting’, but then ‘degenerates into a rather trite, hectic chase with a thoroughly unresolved ending’. Although some reviewers appreciated the film’s liberal warning against complacency and conformity and regarded it as ‘an outstanding product of its kind’, it was doomed by its generic affiliations at best ‘to serve profitably and popularly as a supporting piece on any dual program’.1 As the Showmen’s Trade Review judged, ‘Sold to the followers of horror and science-fiction pictures in the area where they abound, this film should do okay.’2 Ultimately, of course, it did more than ‘okay’. Although not one Broadway theatre booked Invasion of the Body Snatchers in its first run, it eventually performed well enough at the box office to gross $1,200,000 (US) on its final cost of $416,911.3 More significantly, the importance with which the film has been regarded by both critics and fans has grown steadily in the half century since its initial syndication on American television in 1959, culminating with its inclusion in the US National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in 1994. With its paranoid plot of emotionless alien duplicates replacing average folk, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the first postwar horror film to locate the monstrous in the normal, four years

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before Psycho (1960), thus marking a pivotal moment in the history of the genre. Within its generic formulas, the film addresses numerous issues brewing in postwar US society, including the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the changing dynamics of gender relations. A cult favourite and an acknowledged classic of American cinema, the film has inspired three remakes to date: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Philip Kaufman in 1978; Body Snatchers, directed by Abel Ferrara in 1993; and The Invasion, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel in 2007. In fact, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has become nothing less than a cultural touchstone. In the videogame Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004), for example, a paramedic mentions it in a radio conversation with Snake; and in the episode of the television series The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo (1979) entitled ‘The Girls with the Stolen Bodies’, Deputy Perkins (Mills Watson) wonders, in response to a number of disappearances, if he is paranoid because he has seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers too many times. Episodes of other television shows such as ‘Invasion of the Mork Snatchers’ from Mork & Mindy (1980), ‘Invasion of the Psychologist Snatchers’ from Family Ties (1987), ‘Invasion of the Muppet Snackers’ from Muppet Babies (1987) and ‘Invasion of the Buddy Snatchers’ from Dharma & Greg (1998) all reference the film and its title in some way. Just a few of the movies in which the film is referenced are Morons from Outer Space (1985), The Faculty (1998), Hot Wax Zombies on Wheels (1999), and Invasion of the Pod People (2007). In Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) Gizmo watches the film on television, and in Gremlin 2: The New Batch (1990), Dr Catheter (Christopher Lee) at one point carries a seed pod. The animated cartoon Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers (1992) features Bugs Bunny in the Miles Bennell role along with other Warner Bros.’ cartoon characters. In short, ‘pod’ is a term that has entered popular discourse as a shorthand description of people who are emotionally remote or alienated. The film’s enduring popularity derives in large part from a combination of a central metaphor for the monstrous that, like the

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vampire or the zombie, is sufficiently flexible to accommodate multiple interpretations, with a style and structure that is admirably economical even as it is highly expressive. The film’s narrative, which takes place over a mere three days, is told in flashback in a hospital emergency room by a wildly dishevelled doctor, Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), to Dr Hill (Whit Bissell), a psychiatrist from the state mental hospital, and the attending physician, Dr Harvey Bassett (Richard Deacon). Protesting that he is not crazy (his first line of dialogue), Miles begins to tell his astonishing story to Dr Hill as a wavering dissolve takes us back to a few days earlier. Here is one instance where this Hollywood cliché for a transition to a flashback makes perfect sense, since Miles is, if not indeed insane, certainly suffering from a murky memory after psychological trauma and serious sleep deprivation. Miles explains in voice-over that when he returned from a medical conference to his small home town of Santa Mira, California in response to an urgent message from his nurse and receptionist, Sally (Jean Willes), he seemed to have stumbled upon a strange mass delusion affecting the townsfolk, with many people experiencing paranoid fantasies that their friends or family members were imposters. Miles’s old flame Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), like him recently divorced, has also returned to town, and she comes to see Introducing our narrator

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him in his office in part because her cousin Wilma (Virginia Christine) has this same odd intuition about her Uncle Ira (Tom Fadden). After visiting Wilma and Ira, but seeing nothing amiss, Miles and Becky go out for dinner, but they are interrupted when his friends, the writer Jack (King Donovan) and Teddy (Carolyn Jones) Belicec telephone, urging Miles to come quickly to their house. When they arrive at the Belicecs’, they find a mysterious, seemingly unfinished body that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Jack. Agreeing that the Belicecs should keep watch overnight, Miles escorts Becky to her father’s place, where they flirt briefly, after which he returns home. Shortly thereafter he is interrupted by Jack and Teddy, who is hysterical with fear after having seen the odd body move and develop a cut similar to the one on Jack’s hand. Miles calls his friend, the psychiatrist Danny Kaufman (Larry Gates), and then, sensing something is wrong at Becky’s, goes there and discovers a duplicate of her in the basement. He takes her sleeping body back to his house, where all four meet with Danny, who is sceptical. At his request, they go back to the Belicecs’ and Mr Driscoll’s (Kenneth Patterson) house, but find no body in either place. Danny explains everything as ‘a completely normal mystery … well within the bounds of human experience’ amplified by their ripe imaginations as the scene fades out.

The psychiatrist (Larry Gates) provides a rational explanation

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‘I need a martini’; ‘They’re like huge seed pods’

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The two couples have spent the night at Miles’s house, and as the next scene fades in, it is morning, bright sunlight reassuringly streaming in the window, and Becky is making breakfast for Miles and the Belicecs in the kitchen. That day several of Miles’s patients now seem to be cured of their paranoid delusions that their relatives are not really their relatives, and with things seeming to return to normal Miles comes home for a barbecue dinner with Becky, Jack and Teddy. But while preparing the meal they discover replicant bodies of themselves popping out of giant seed pods in the greenhouse. Quickly deducing that the pods replace people while they are asleep, they decide to split up, with Jack and Teddy trying to escape and get help while Miles and Becky end up hiding in his office in town. The following morning Jack, now a pod person, shows up with Danny to detain Miles and Becky until they fall asleep and are changed. The couple manage to overpower their captors and escape into the surrounding hills by masquerading as pod replicants until they can get out of town. Becky unintentionally displays emotion when she shouts out as a dog is about to be hit by a passing truck, and they are pursued by the town’s residents, all now pods. The couple hide from the pursuing townsfolk in an abandoned mining tunnel, but Becky falls asleep, becomes a pod and betrays Miles, who manages to escape on his own with the intention of warning the world. He makes it to a nearby highway, where he stands between lanes jammed with traffic shouting warnings to the heedless drivers and directly to the camera (‘They’re here already! You’re next!’). As Miles finishes his story another wavering dissolve returns us to the present. The two doctors concur that Miles is insane (‘mad as a March hare’ is Dr Bassett’s blunt diagnosis), and they are about to commit him for observation when an ambulance team brings in an accident victim, a truck driver, and the paramedic wheeling the gurney happens to remark that they had to dig him out from something unusual, a truckload of giant seed pods. Now believing Miles’s incredible story, Dr Hill stops in his tracks, turns to the two

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Miles’s frantic warnings go unheeded; Miles shouts ‘You’re next!’ to the camera

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policemen who have brought Miles in and exclaims, in the film’s last words, ‘Get on your radio and sound an All Points Alarm! Block all highways and stop all traffic and call in every law enforcement agency in the state!’ as the camera, in the final shot, tracks in to a close-up of Miles’s overwrought face with an expression somewhere between relief and anguish as the concluding (and in retrospect, rather ambiguous) title ‘The End’ appears beneath him. At the start of the film Miles begins telling his story to Dr Hill (‘for me it started last Thursday … ’), but I am starting here at the end, because the conclusion of the framing narrative is inseparable from its beginning. Added by Siegel in postproduction at the insistence of the studio, the narrative frame has been the subject of much discussion, particularly the question of whether it detracts from the power of the film to disturb. Alan Lovell is not alone in reading the added ending as completely changing the film, a shift that he views as being as radical as the ending of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), ‘because the authorities are persuaded of the danger that the Body Snatchers represent and the film, therefore, does not end on a disturbing note’.4 For this reason, Danny Peary confesses that ‘I am relieved that there is still a chance to get rid of those damn pods … I like the fact that Miles’ story is believed, even if this means we might temporarily be placed under martial law.’5 Siegel had wanted to end the film with the penultimate scene, as Miles frantically attempts to stop cars on the highway, warning people about the pods, but Allied Artists pushed for the narrative frame because the studio was nervous about the film’s downbeat message and abrupt, unresolved ending. Yet Siegel may have had the last laugh, for the film’s undeniable power derives in large part from the fact that the end remains unsettling despite the apparent closure. Siegel himself disliked the frame ending, but was convinced by screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring to shoot the additional scenes because the studio would have had another director do it anyway. The director had wanted the horror of the pods to be revealed to the audience more slowly, but with the added voice-over (not to mention

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the title) the spectator knows more than Miles from the outset rather than, like him, discovering the truth about the apparent mass hysteria by degree. Nevertheless, the way Siegel has shot these scenes, and their context within the film, encourage a much less optimistic outcome than Lovell suggests. In most horror and science fiction movies of the period, certainly, such final words as Dr Hill’s exhortation to the policemen to mobilise the might of the state would bring comfortable closure, for once the American military is involved in the action, the threat, whether extraterrestrial monster or homegrown mutation, is typically neutralised. In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), for example, the army initially falters in tracking down and defeating the large dinosaur that threatens New York because the blood dripping from its open wound is radioactive, but eventually the military devises and employs new technology to kill it; and in Them! (1954) – a film that, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, has been interpreted as a paranoid fantasy of Communist infiltration – the army destroys the nest of giant mutated ants and tracks down its queen to the Los Angeles sewer system, where it is killed as well. American military might and scientific know-how also prevail in such other monster movies of the time as It Conquered the World (1956), The Deadly Mantis (1957), The Giant Claw (1957), The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957). In The Thing from Another World (1951), it takes only a handful of American soldiers and scientists to defeat the invidious alien threat. War of the Worlds (1953) is perhaps the exception that proves the rule, for here, uniquely, America’s military arsenal, including nuclear weapons, is helpless against Martian technology, and it is only earthly microbes that in the end bring down the Martian invaders. Otherwise, even on the brink of Earth’s certain defeat by aliens in Earth versus the Flying Saucers (1956), the US finds a way to thwart the extraterrestrial invasion in the nick of time. Clearly this cycle of monster movies fulfilled the ritual satisfactions of genre movies, at once supplying both the asocial thrill

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of what Susan Sontag called ‘the aesthetics of destruction’6 and the restoration of authority and order in the narrative. These movies aroused shared anxieties in order to assuage them in the uncertain times of the Cold War and the dawn of the atomic age, as well as a period of rapid and radical social change. Considered in this historical context, the ending of Invasion of the Body Snatchers gains additional force because it seems to offer once again the monster movie’s comfortable closure, to provide unproblematically the pleasures of the genre, only to undermine it in the end. The conclusion of the film, even with the narrative frame, is notably more ambiguous than the ending of Jack Finney’s source novel. Although in the book Miles’s narrative begins by calling itself into question (‘It will not be neatly tied up at the end, everything resolved and satisfactorily explained. … Because I can’t say … just how it began, how it ended or if it has ended’),7 in fact all is comfortably resolved: after Miles sets fire to a field of growing pods, forcing those that do not burn to rise into the sky and beat a deliberate retreat from Earth, the town returns to normal and is already starting to revitalise even as Becky (along with the Belicecs), survives, and she and Miles marry. By contrast, the ending of the film becomes more problematic the more we think about it; it may seem upbeat, but in fact the ending offers only an apparent closure that makes it more akin to the ironic ending of, say, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), released just the year before Siegel’s film, than to Caligari. Ultimately, the ending as we have it conveys a sense that something is not quite right, although it seems to be – not unlike the pod people themselves. On the one hand, the frame puts the film’s narrative in the past – if not quite recollected in tranquillity, certainly at a safer remove from the viewer. It creates a cognitive disjunction between character and audience, as Siegel had noted. But, on the other hand, how could the FBI or any federal or state agency possibly contain the pod invasion, which already has spread much wider than the town of Santa Mira? Jack observes as much in the novel: bemoaning the bureaucracy they will have to wade through to deliver

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their warning, he says to Miles, ‘Can you actually imagine this reaching a level where something could be done; and then having it actually done? My God, you know the Army!’8 The pod people had been relentlessly pursuing Miles through the hills and to the highway, until one of them (Charlie, the meter reader, played by Sam Peckinpah) says, ‘Let him go. They’ll never believe him.’ But even if they do – which is in fact what happens, but only through the fortuitous coincidence of the truck accident (divine providence?) – what, really, can be done? The trucks have already departed to the nearby towns of Crescent City, Redbank, Havenhurst, Milltown and Valley Springs – ‘a malignant disease spreading through the whole country’, as Miles rightly observes. ‘If they’ve taken over the telephone office, we’re dead’, Miles says to Becky when they try unsuccessfully to call for help, and the reason they flee the town in the climax is precisely because the telephone operators had prevented them from placing any calls outside Santa Mira. (Ironically, the stalling tactics of the telephone operators sound indistinguishable from their typically detached drone.) Then, when a frantic Miles reaches the highway, he is brushed aside by a truck with a load of pods, and as the truck passes his spinning body we see the names of the destinations serviced by the

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trucking company roll by: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle – the major cities of the American west coast. The highway on which Miles shouts his warning is an overpass with another multiline highway intersecting it below. Finney’s novel explicitly identifies it as US Route 101, a major state highway and the longest in California.9 In short, the pods are simply too dispersed now for all of them to be tracked down and destroyed. Today, furthermore, after the experiences of 9/11 and the government’s inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and ‘If they’ve taken over the telephone office, we’re dead.’

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the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, American viewers are likely to be even more sceptical of the government’s ability to contain the threat of the pods because of the massive scale of military and civil response that would be required. Any such operation, of course, would be made more unlikely by the necessity of identifying every pod person already out there (could the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the country’s top scientists, meeting together in Washington, develop a Voight-Kampff Test in time?) and to find and destroy every hidden, waiting pod. Even those viewers who in the past had read the ending as comfortable closure returning the world to normality would be harder to convince now. Back in the film’s present, after Miles finishes his narration, the thought that Dr Hill might be a pod may cross our minds, as surely as it must Miles’s. After all, he has been betrayed by one psychiatrist already, and at this point we, like Miles, have every reason to be wary. Is Dr Hill’s reassuring look at Miles as he orders all lawenforcement agencies to be mobilised an indication of true concern and alarm, or merely ‘the pretence of emotion’, as Wilma earlier says of Uncle Ira’s substitute? The question is further complicated by the fact that Whit Bissell, who plays Dr Hill, is hardly the most expressive of actors. But even if we give him the benefit of the doubt,

‘Get on your radio and sound an All Points Alarm!’

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what about the two policemen who stand silently by during Miles’s story? We know nothing about these two officers to whom Dr Hill gives his emergency orders; they say nothing throughout the entire affair and then, upon Dr Hill’s instructions, they leave in unison, very possibly already pods themselves, like Santa Mira’s policemen. In any case, what about Miles, our hero, who says he will never surrender, and whose valiant struggles to survive the invasion and warn the world we have followed? No amount of military force can prevent him from eventually succumbing to that pod, now fully grown, back in his office. As the pod Jack patiently observes to Miles, ‘Sooner or later you’ll have to go to sleep.’ Miles Bennell has already gone miles before he sleeps, but eventually he must sink into its comforting, enveloping blackness, conceding to the biggest sleep of all … .

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1 Popcorn and Podsnappery In the 1950s, Hollywood’s big movies became ‘bigger and better than ever’, largely as a response to the perceived competition of the new medium of television. After the success of Merian C. Cooper’s This Is Cinerama (1952), the decade saw the majors release a series of very popular big-budget films in a variety of widescreen formats. Paramount developed VistaVision, first used for White Christmas (1954) and then for some of the studio’s other big films including Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), billed as ‘the greatest event in motion picture history’. Twentieth Century-Fox released The Robe (1953), The King and I (1956) and several other major productions in CinemaScope. Oklahoma! (1955) was distributed by RKO in both Todd-AO and CinemaScope versions. All of these movies emphasised surface spectacle over thematic depth, entertainment over engagement. According to Murray Pomerance, ‘the gaudy, intoxicating culture of the screen was perhaps never so removed from the pressures and concerns of everyday life as during this decade’.10 This denial of the real is certainly true of, for example, Around the World in 80 Days, one of the biggest films of 1956, the same year as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A blockbuster spectacle shot in lavish Technicolor and in Todd-AO, and winner of five Academy Awards including Best Picture, its story concerns an epic race around the world against time by Victorian Englishman Phileas Fogg (David Niven). The film’s global narrative scope is telling in the context of contemporary world events. Several European colonies achieved independence at that time, and in the summer of 1956 Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, the major shipping route in the Middle East, resulting in an international political crisis. Even as these events marked the beginning of the end of Europe’s colonial era, Around the World in 80 Days depicted an

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Anglo-European’s global mobility at the height of the British Empire due to a combination of technology and tenacity, with other countries becoming merely exotic backdrops that allow this white European male to achieve his goals. Invasion of the Body Snatchers stands in stark contrast to these big pictures in every respect. The film offers a paranoid vision of empire, concentrating instead on images of entrapment and enclosure as part of a nightmarish scenario in which America is besieged on its own turf. Like H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898), it is a horror story about colonisation coming home to roost. As in Wells’s tale, the film depicts an invasion of the homeland, this time as an archetypal town is infiltrated and conquered. As one of the pod spokesmen says to Miles in the novel, ‘After all – what have you people done – with the forests that covered the continent? And the farm lands you’ve turned into dust? You, too, have used them up – and then … moved on. Don’t look so shocked.’11 Interestingly, the first Hollywood adaptation of War of the Worlds was directed by Byron Haskin, one of Siegel’s mentors during his apprenticeship at Warner Bros., and released just three years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers. One can only speculate about the

Colonialism coming home to roost

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influence that Haskin, who directed a number of other notable science fiction films including Conquest of Space (1955), Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) and The Power (1968), may have had on the future director of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Certainly Haskin’s The Naked Jungle (1954), an adaptation of Carl Stephenson’s famous short story ‘Leinigen versus the Ants’, about a European plantation owner in Brazil who battles an invading horde of omnivorous ants, also shares with Invasion of the Body Snatchers a vision of the coloniser besieged. In Santa Mira, as Danny Peary aptly points out, a town where the Spanish must have pushed out the native Indian population, and subsequently English-speaking Americans must have pushed out the Spanish, the pod people are just one more in a long line of invaders who are bent on wiping out the previous culture.12

Lacking A-picture production values and shot in moody black and white, Invasion of the Body Snatchers features no expansive or scenic landscapes, as in many of the gorgeous colour Westerns of the period. Instead, claustrophobia and menace suffuse the film’s mise en scène. Even the hills that surround Santa Mira seem to hem the town in, to constrain it, rather than to provide a picturesque backdrop. The film’s very rejection of the bloated production values of Hollywood’s big pictures is consistent with its critique of contemporary American society as empty and bland on the inside. With its downbeat ambience and lack of big stars, tagged with lowbrow genre labels and offering minimal special effects, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was mostly another creature feature for Allied Artists, the studio that would also distribute, among others, Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), The Blob (1958), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) and House on Haunted Hill (1959). Even before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Allied Artists had distributed The Maze (1953), shot in 3-D, and Target Earth (1954), participating in the period’s prolific production of science fiction and horror films that John Baxter aptly dubbed ‘Springtime for Caliban’.13

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Unlike so many of the period’s blockbuster productions, more often it was the low-budget exploitation SF and horror movies that acknowledged the era’s social and political tensions, albeit comfortably ensconced within the coded terms of genre. Most of the beasts that slouched, slithered, soared or staggered across American movie screens of the decade were explained as being caused by nuclear testing or alien invasion, both metaphors for Cold War fears. The ‘space race’ in the films that preceded these monster movies is explicitly motivated by military considerations rather than by the disinterested destiny of objective science. Destination Moon (1950), the film that launched the decade’s spate of science fiction films, envisions the first successfully manned lunar flight and urges that ‘whoever controls the moon will control the Earth’. When the astronauts land on the lunar surface they claim the moon ‘by the grace of God’ and ‘for the benefit of mankind’ in the name of the United States. The film implies the existence of an interstellar domino theory and thus provides ideological support for American imperialism. The same idea informs the work of the astronomer (Arthur Franz) in Invaders from Mars (1953), who remarks that Claustrophobia and menace suffuse the film’s mise en scène

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the nation’s reason for conquering space is that ‘If anybody dared attack us, we could push a few buttons and destroy them in a matter of minutes.’ When monsters were not threatening the nation’s urban centres – Los Angeles in War of the Worlds, New York in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms – they operated in the average American town, yet posed an equally insidious threat. Rather than wholesale death and destruction, these creatures brought something perhaps more horrible, a life-indeath, a state of being in which, somehow, one was not his or her true self. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, movies such as It Came from Outer Space (1953), Invaders from Mars, and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) reflected both Cold War fears of the Communist conspiracy from afar and of colourless conformity at home, particularly in the wake of McCarthyism, as in their plots people are taken over by alien Others. Similar concerns informed SF writing of the period as well in such novels as Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951) and Murray Leinster’s The Brain Stealers (1954). Although none of these films achieved the cultural resonance of Siegel’s film, Invaders from Mars offers a particularly illuminating comparison to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for its similarities as well as differences. The film’s plot involves a boy, David (Jimmy Hunt), whom no one will believe when he tries to warn people about an alien invasion. From his bedroom window one night, David witnesses a flying saucer land in the sand pit over the rise adjacent to his home. He tells his parents, and although they refuse to believe him, David persists in his story, and the next morning his father (Leif Erickson) goes off to inspect the sand pit. He returns acting strangely distant and wooden. The same thing then happens to his mother (Hillary Brooke). As we discover later, his parents have been sucked underground by the Martian invader (there is in fact only one) and his android servants, programmed through needles implanted in their necks and attached to the base of their brains, and then returned to the surface to carry out the alien’s scheme to sabotage the US’s nascent space programme. The Martian’s plan reflects anxieties about Communist expansion, figured

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as underground burrowing – in this case, right into the nation’s ‘own backyard’. As in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the people of the town are taken over, with no one aware of what is transpiring except David. Finally, the boy manages to convince the authorities of the truth of his story, and the nearby army base is alerted and mobilised. The military blasts its way into the alien spacecraft, and the Martian and his android slaves are forced to retreat. As the ship is taking off, the army blows it up and everyone who had been programmed by the alien wakes to normal consciousness. The film’s director, William Cameron Menzies, who also made the British science fiction film Things to Come (1936), adapted by H. G. Wells from his own book, was better known as a set designer, having worked with Hitchcock and many other important Hollywood directors. For his work on Gone with the Wind in 1939, David O. Selznick created the credit ‘production designer’. Menzies designed his own sets for Invaders from Mars, and they effectively enhance the feeling of entrapment experienced by the young protagonist, as in, for example, the radically foreshortened police station with its surrealistically bare walls, into which David comes for help before realising that the police chief has already been taken over. Little Jimmy Grimaldi’s (Bobby Clark) cry in Miles’s office that his mother isn’t his mother (‘Don’t let her get me’) echoes David’s similar protest in Invaders from Mars, which in a way is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers told from Jimmy Grimaldi’s point of view. But the look of Menzies’s film is very different from Siegel’s: where Invaders from Mars exhibits a stylised minimalism, Invasion of the Body Snatchers reveals an eye for mundane detail, like the signs advertising Red-e-Crete concrete and Sunbeam electric mixers in the window of Mr Driscoll’s hardware store, that is perfectly appropriate for conveying its paranoid scenario of the horror within the normal. Strikingly, Invaders from Mars also features a coda that, like the frame in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, similarly subverts comfortable closure. As the Martian spaceship blows up, the film cuts to David starting awake in his bed in the middle of the night. His

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parents comfort him, like Dorothy’s kindly aunt and uncle at the end of The Wizard of Oz (1939), from what we now understand has all along been David’s nightmare. Then, trying to go back to sleep in his own bed, David sees flashing lights and goes to his window, where he sees a flying saucer landing in the sand pit just as he had in his dream at the beginning of the film. ‘Gee whiz’, exclaims an awed David again at the end as he gazes skyward from his window just as he had in the film’s opening scene. The opening shot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, behind the credits, is of a sky, clouds scudding across the screen in fast motion. The rapid movement of the clouds is unnatural, suggesting that something is awry in the world, a feeling reinforced by the clouds themselves, which seem to grow darker and more ominous as the shot progresses. While this portentous image may have become a cliché of more recent apocalyptic films, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers the connotations of a gathering storm are clear enough. At the beginning of the decade, The Thing from Another World concluded with the journalist’s warning to humanity to ‘Keep watching the skies!’, an injunction reiterated first in Invaders from Mars and again three years later in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The gathering storm

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2 Pod People For Al LaValley, who has provided the most detailed account of the film’s production in print, the tensions between the several major creative personalities responsible for Invasion of the Body Snatchers is reflected in the rather diverse readings the film has inspired. However, the intersecting interests of the film’s various creators, and the alacrity with which the film was made, suggest a more harmonious process – at least until after production had wrapped. It was only later, in postproduction, that delays occurred as the film went through a series of changes, including extensive recutting as well as the addition of the framing narrative and the voice-over by Kevin McCarthy. In fact, a full ten months elapsed from the completion of shooting until the film was finally released in February 1956, and according to Matthew Bernstein, ‘The interminable debate’ between the makers and the studio regarding the ending and framing narrative ultimately added $30,000 to the film’s final price, or ‘nearly 10 percent, to its negative cost’.14 John Belton’s observation that the quality of Don Siegel’s films ‘varies with the talents of his collaborators’15 is particularly true of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, given its unique status in Siegel’s oeuvre. A brief consideration of the work of the principal participants readily reveals their influence on and contributions to the textual richness of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Jack Finney’s original source novel was serialised in three successive issues of Collier’s magazine beginning in the 26 November 1954 issue and then in the 10 December and 24 December 1954 issues. It was subsequently published in book form in 1955, and republished as a Dell paperback in 1961 with its name changed from Body Snatchers to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Finney, who had worked in advertising in New York before becoming a writer and

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moving to Marin County in California, where the novel is set, wrote primarily science fiction, mostly short stories that were published in mainstream magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s and Collier’s rather than in the SF and fantasy pulps. One of his science fiction stories, ‘Such Interesting Neighbors’, was adapted as the second episode of the early science fiction television series Science Fiction Theatre and directed by Jack Arnold in 1955, and as an episode of Steven Spielberg’s television series Amazing Stories in 1987 entitled ‘Neighbors’. The majority of Finney’s science fiction stories, some of which were reprinted in his collection The Third Level (1957, published as The Clock of Time in the UK a year later), including the title piece, involve time travel and are informed by a strong sense of nostalgia. As in stories such as ‘Second Chance’, in which the narrator escapes to a preferable past in his antique automobile, Finney’s characters often seek a route to another era or place in order to evade the pressures of the urban present. The nameless narrator of ‘I’m Scared’ is investigating a multitude of bizarre events in which people seem to have experienced shifts in time, and in the end he attributes these otherwise inexplicable events to ‘a growing rebellion against the present’ and an ‘increasing longing for the past’. As he observes, ‘For the first time in man’s history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant’, and concludes that, as a result of ‘millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time’, time itself has ruptured.16 As discussed later on, the same nostalgia informs Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which evokes a wistful ideal of small-town America now threatened by the pods. When they burst open, the pods spill out their inhuman parodies of modern alienated, depersonalised people, recalling the reason for the temporal ruptures and flight from the present in ‘I’m Scared’. Much of the plot and dialogue in Invasion of the Body Snatchers is taken directly from Finney’s book. In an interview with Arthur LeGacy, Finney claims that the film retains so much from his

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novel in large part because he wrote it, as was the case with all his novels, with the potential of adaptation in mind.17 The year before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, his crime novel Five against the House (1954, serialised initially in Good Housekeeping) was adapted for the big screen, as were the later novels Good Neighbour Sam (1964) and Assault on a Queen (1965). One can see Finney’s visual thinking clearly in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the scene where Jack shows Miles the pod body on his pool table, for example, Finney has Miles observe of the overhead light that Jack switches on, ‘The shade still swung in a tiny half-inch arc, the light spilling off over the edge of the table, then retreating to the open eyes of the body, leaving the smooth forehead in semi-dark for an instant’18 – a visually evocative anticipation of the noir-like style that would inform the look of this scene in the film. Walter Wanger, the film’s producer, must have perceived this visual potential immediately because he quickly sought to acquire the rights even though two further instalments of the story were yet to be published.19 Only two weeks after the final instalment of the story appeared in the 24 December issue of Collier’s, Wanger, Siegel and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring were meeting with Finney in Mill Valley, in Marin County north of San Francisco, where Finney lived,

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to discuss the film. Wanger was a college-educated intellectual of liberal politics and an independent producer responsible for a number of genre films with a message, among them Gabriel over the White House (1933), Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945). Clearly he recognised not only the visual potential of the novel, but also its liberal social message. ‘The picture was made’, as Stuart Kaminsky writes, ‘with the conviction that something significant was being communicated.’20 But if Finney envisioned his gripping parable as a nostalgic, conservative cry for the loss of traditional values in contemporary America, the filmmakers saw it as a liberal critique of, as Siegel put it, ‘a general state of mind that is found in everyday life’.21 In 1951, Wanger shot MCA agent Jennings Lang, whom he believed to be having an affair with his wife, actress Joan Bennett, wounding him in the groin; charged with assault with a deadly weapon and facing a possible fourteen-year jail term, Wanger pleaded temporary insanity and served four months in prison. The experience affected him profoundly and later helped him work toward a comeback with the critically and commercially successful prisonreform drama Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), directed by Don Siegel. Siegel had also directed Wanger’s earlier production for RKO, The Big Steal (1949), a competent noir which reunited stars Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer from Out of the Past (1947). In his biography of Wanger, Matthew Bernstein hypothesises that Finney’s story may have had particular appeal for him in that ‘it paralleled Wanger’s personal and professional experience of alienation’ and points to a similarity between Miles and ‘Wanger’s own professional posture as the lone crusader who thinks only of Hollywood’s best interest’.22 Wanger first discussed the idea for a film adaptation of Finney’s novel with an enthusiastic Siegel, and together they brought to the project Mainwaring, who had written the screenplay for The Big Steal; Kevin McCarthy, who had worked for Siegel on his previous film, An Annapolis Story (1955), as had Mainwaring; and art director Edward ‘Ted’ Haworth, whose impressive credits as art

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director or production designer (among them, five films for Peckinpah) include two subsequent films with Siegel: The Beguiled (1971) and Telefon (1977). Siegel had met Mainwaring, then a publicist at Warner Bros., while working as an editor in the studio’s montage department, and Mainwaring would write or co-write five of the films Siegel directed, beginning with The Big Steal through The Gun Runners (1958). As Geoffrey Homes, Mainwaring wrote the screenplay for Out of the Past, based on his own, final novel, Build My Gallows High (1946). In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as in Out of the Past, the male protagonist descends into a nightmarish world after becoming involved with a woman ‘out of his past’. Mainwaring’s crime and mystery novels are largely set in small California towns, and according to Joseph Losey, with whom he worked on The Lawless (1950), ‘This is one of the things that makes me very close to Dan Mainwaring – his experience of Americana, the nostalgia of the good things about small towns.’23 For Patrick McGilligan, Mainwaring’s screenplays for The Hitch-Hiker (uncredited 1953, directed by Ida Lupino), The Phenix City Story (1955, directed by Phil Karlson although Siegel was originally assigned to it by Allied Artists) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers constitute a trilogy that represents

Miles detours with a woman out of his past

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‘the perfect cinematic realization of the burgeoning middle-class paranoia of the fifties’.24 Mainwaring’s vision had clear similarities to Finney’s, and, as with Wanger, it is clear why he was attracted to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Although Mainwaring adopted his nom de plume well before the era of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which, notably, was one of the works he signed with his real name), his career suffered because of the blacklist, and his later work, much of it for television, is not nearly as pointed in its social criticism. But The Lawless and The Phenix City Story, perhaps drawing upon Mainwaring’s earlier experiences as a private detective and crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, are both message pictures in which heroic individuals, like Miles Bennell, are the only ones in passive communities willing to stand up against social injustice. In the latter film, based on actual events involving vice and crime in Phenix City, Alabama, the local townsfolk ignore the pervasive corruption of the casinos and brothels; like pod people they turn a blind eye as they walk by on the street. But like Miles, one man (Richard Kiley), here a returning veteran and lawyer who had been abroad prosecuting war criminals, understands the necessity of taking action against the town’s institutionalised corruption despite the overwhelming odds he faces. In the climax, the

The musings of Miles

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lone hero galvanises the good people of the town, who rally around him as he tries to get outside help and, dishevelled like Miles after his personal battle, picks up the telephone and says, ‘Give me the state capitol – this is an emergency.’ In this case, unlike in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, martial law is declared and the state militia, mobilised by the governor, quickly arrives to take control of the situation. The film’s social crusader is heroic to the extent that he fulfils Miles’s observation in Invasion of the Body Snatchers while he and Becky hide in his office – dialogue that Mainwaring added and which has no counterpart in the novel – that ‘In my practice I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away … only it happens slowly instead of all at once. … Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us.’ Mainwaring finished a first draft of the screenplay on 10 February, less than six weeks after being hired. Richard Collins, writer of Siegel’s earlier Riot in Cell Block 11 and co-writer of China Venture (1953), was brought in for a week’s rewrite in the second week of March, although the extent of his work on Mainwaring’s script is unclear. (The same is true of Sam Peckinpah’s contribution, whose account differs from Siegel’s. The director claimed that Peckinpah did no work on the script, but the production files indicate

Sam Peckinpah as Charlie, the gas meter reader

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that he was paid $250 for one week’s work as writer.)25 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was shot quickly, in twenty-three days between 23 March and 18 April in the spring of 1955 and costing only $382, 190 – typical for low-budget movies at the time.26 There was no second unit. The final cost for the film’s few special effects was just over $5,000 – ‘a very small amount’, according to Siegel, mostly for the body casts needed for the pod replicas of the four principals, their latex skin and mechanised frames, and the compressed air and chemicals employed to pop the pod embryos from their pods and to emit the frothy, bubbling liquid around them.27 In the greenhouse scene, ‘the bursting of the bubbles was shot in slow motion; the bubbles then were processed in reverse to create the effect of forming faces’.28 According to a studio press release dated 18 April 1955, the day principal photography on the film wrapped, it ‘established a record in reaching the photography stage 90 days after the last installment of the story ran in Collier’s’.29 After some postproduction work with studio producer and editor Richard Heermance, Siegel wrote to Wanger on 19 May that ‘for what it is and for what has been put in it, Body Snatchers is about as good as we could hope it to be’.30 A rough cut was screened on 10 June, after which John Flinn, Director of Advertising and Publicity at AA, judged that the film was ‘a sure fire box office winner … that should equal or surpass the results of “Riot”’.31 Studio executives liked the film, but were concerned about the ending, with Miles shouting ‘You’re next!’ on the highway, which was felt to be confusingly abrupt. Nevertheless, an initial release date was set for September. Wanger, however, was not entirely satisfied, and he began to conceive a variety of changes, almost all of which were designed to make the movie’s message more explicit. It was Wanger who originally devised Miles’s voice-over to help viewers follow the story, and in May McCarthy’s voice-overs were recorded.32 Some of Wanger’s ideas are embarrassingly didactic, such as incorporating an excerpt from a wartime speech by Winston Churchill:

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The day may dawn when fair play, love for one’s fellow men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.

But this idea was discarded when he was not able to secure copyright.33 Another concept was to have Orson Welles appear on screen introducing the story. As early as 15 June, Wanger was drafting the first of several prologues for Welles, playing on the actor’s infamous ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast by his Mercury Theatre on the Air on Halloween night, 1938 (‘This is Orson Welles. I warn you that this is a strange story, full of unanswered questions … ’). In one version, Welles would be standing on the shoulder of Highway 101 near the fictional Santa Mira exit; in another, he would be sitting in an armchair, Masterpiece Theatre-style, beginning his introduction by distinguishing between his infamous but fictional ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast and what is ‘really’ happening in the small town of Santa Mira, California. This prologue then would segue into the film’s opening scene, with the police car arriving at the hospital, and also anticipate the warning ‘You’re next!’ at the end.34 Siegel told Wanger he was definitely against the idea, but Wanger offered Welles, who was then working in London, £10,000 for his participation. Wanger’s backup plan, also abandoned, was to feature a comparable introduction presented by a television news personality such as John Cameron Swayze, Lowell Thomas or, his first choice, Edward R. Murrow, who might bring the ‘Person to Person’ documentary approach of his interviews with famous people to a meeting with a recovering Dr Bennell.35 Welles ultimately proved difficult to pin down, and both plans were cancelled when the framing story was shot instead. At Wanger’s request, Allied Artists arranged three preview screenings of the film, at the Picwood Theatre in Westwood on 29 June, the Encino Theatre in Encino on 30 June, and at the Fox West Coast Theatre in Long Beach on 1 July, to apparently mixed audience

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response. A fourth, also arranged by a concerned Wanger at the Bay Theatre in Encino in August, was a disaster, with some people walking out and others laughing at inappropriate moments. In a memo to himself dated 24 August, Wanger attributed the poor audience reaction to the fact that ‘a great deal of the humanity and quality of the picture was eliminated by sharp, so-called “B” cutting’. He opined that the studio was ‘panicked’ by the previews, which Wanger described in his memo as merely ‘normal treatment’.36 As LaValley suggests, it was probably at this point that the studio eliminated some of the film’s humour, as Siegel and Mainwaring have both averred, because of Allied Artists’ policy precluding the mixing of comedy and horror. Unfortunately, as LaValley also notes, the production files contain no documentation regarding the subsequent major addition of the framing story and voice-over narration; but it seems clear that the definite decision to insert the framing narrative was made after this unhappy preview. Siegel shot these scenes on 16 September at the studio.37 In subsequent interviews Siegel typically blamed Allied Artists for the narrative frame, although in a memo to Wanger dated 21 September, after he had seen the film with the new frame and voice-over, Siegel admitted that its addition had helped the picture.38 Created in 1947, Allied Artists had evolved out of Monogram Pictures, a Poverty Row studio founded in the early 1930s that specialised in B Westerns with Bob Steele and John Wayne, and series such as the Bowery Boys, the Cisco Kid, Bomba the Jungle Boy and the Mr Wong mysteries with Boris Karloff. Essentially a rebranding of Monogram, in the postwar era Allied Artists, led by Samuel ‘Steve’ Broidy and vice-president Walter Mirisch, began to upgrade from B films to what they called ‘B-plus’ or ‘nervous A’ pictures in addition to its more traditional B productions, with budgets in some cases up to $1 million and working mostly with independent producers.39 In 1953 the Monogram moniker was abandoned and the studio would henceforth be known as Allied Artists Picture Corporation until it fell into bankruptcy in 1979. As Broidy said, ‘It was the same company,

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same personnel, same everything, but we created a totally different image by calling it Allied Artists.’40 At the time of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Wanger was no longer at the height of his career, in part because of the Jennings Lang affair, as indicated by the fact that he was now working with Allied Artists rather than with one of the major studios. His lowered status intersected well with Broidy and Mirisch’s aspirations to upgrade their productions as a strategy to counter the inevitable decline in demand for B movies in a changing Hollywood. Still, Wanger’s film was not regarded as one of the studio’s prestige productions like Friendly Persuasion (1955, directed by William Wyler) and Love in the Afternoon (1957, directed by Billy Wilder), both of which lost money, and so he found it necessary to compromise his original vision of the film in several ways. An undated studio memo from producer Gordon Griffith described Wanger’s original proposed budget of $454, 864, submitted in February, as ‘unquestionably the most equivocally inconsistent water-soaked budget I have ever seen’, and in response Wanger submitted to Mirisch on 2 March a new budget slashed to $350,000.41 In casting, Wanger’s notes indicate that he had considered several other actors for the role of Miles before settling on Kevin McCarthy, including Richard Kiley (star of The Phenix City Story), who turned it down, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey, Steve Cochran, Gig Young, Darren McGavin, Brian Keith, Charlton Heston, Robert Ryan and John Hodiak, all of whom had higher profiles than McCarthy, whose prior credits consisted mostly of television work in New York. Ultimately, though, despite the budgetary compromise in the casting of the male lead, McCarthy, with his broad physique and lantern jaw, is perfect as Mainwaring’s indomitable lone crusader. Similarly, for Becky, Wanger had thought of Donna Reed, Kim Hunter, Vera Miles, Joanne Dru, Nancy Olsen, Anne Bancroft, Barbara Hale and Betsy Palmer.42 When the relatively unknown Dana Wynter was finally decided upon, she was hyped as

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the ‘star discovery of The View of Pompeii’s Head’ (1955), her one significant previous film credit. Also, while much of the film was shot in the studio, initial plans called for location photography in Mill Valley; but when Allied Artists asked Wanger to trim his initial budget by almost a quarter, the closer location of Sierra Madre, a town in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains near Pasadena less than one hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles, was chosen, along with other nearer locations in Woodland Hills, Chatsworth, Glendale and Los Feliz. The climactic chase sequence was filmed in Beachwood Canyon in the Hollywood Hills and Bronson Canyon in Griffith Park, both northwest of Los Angeles near Glendale. The latter served as a favorite location over the years for numerous low-budget Westerns and horror films, especially those made by the King of the Bs, Roger Corman. Location shooting in Sierra Madre took only five days.43 In the summer of 1955, the studio proposed a new title for the film, ‘They Come from Another World’.44 Rejecting Siegel’s suggestions of ‘Sleep, No More’ and ‘Better Off Dead’, Wanger, along with Siegel, objected to the studio’s new title on the grounds that it placed the film within the context of B science fiction movies and, further, that many patrons would be confused by the title, thinking they had seen it already, most likely because of its similarity to The Thing from Another World. Wanger’s own proposed alternatives included ‘Evil in the Night’ and ‘The World in Danger’, but the studio rejected these as well.45 The title was finally agreed upon on 23 November,46 at once differentiating it from The Body Snatcher (1945), produced by Val Lewton at RKO and based on the Robert Louis Stevenson short story of the same name, and, as Wanger perceived, placing it within the SF and horror exploitation market. Even before the final title was settled upon, Wanger, who initially opposed its connotations of exploitation, was urging a high-profile publicity campaign that would include buttons containing the phrases ‘I don’t want to be a pod’ and ‘Are you a pod?’, but the studio never agreed.47

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Again over Wanger’s objection, the decision was made to release the film in Superscope format. Superscope was a widescreen process applied at the printing stage rather than during photography, demanding adjustments to existing theatre projection equipment rather than the installation of new equipment, as was the case with processes such as CinemaScope. As a result, the Superscope image tended to lose definition and was regarded as inferior to other widescreen processes because of this image degradation. Howard Hughes used Superscope for RKO because it was a less expensive process that had been developed independently of any studio, and thus requiring no additional user fees. Through United Artists, Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954) was the first film to be released with the Superscope process, followed by Underwater! (1955) and Son of Sinbad (1955) for RKO. The opening credits of Invasion of the Body Snatchers are careful to say that the film was ‘produced’ (not filmed) in Superscope, although the appearance of the Superscope credit is accompanied by some appropriately demonstrative notes of composer Carmen Dragon’s music. Given their nervousness about this nervous A, studio executives must have Teaser ad

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had in mind the success of the era’s widescreen productions, hoping that it would give the film an extra boost at the box office. Wanger protested when he saw the final Superscope cut in December 1955, complaining that it ‘is full of distortion, grain, and a cheap, dupey quality is so evident that it looks like a complete photographic mess instead of having been a very fine photographic achievement’. He pleaded with Mirisch to reconsider the Superscope release, but to no avail.48 By the time the film was in postproduction Wanger was busy with several other projects, most of which were eventually aborted, but as a result he became somewhat removed from the studio’s treatment of the film and its marketing. Although Wanger had a three-picture contract with Allied Artists, of which Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the first, he abruptly switched to RKO, signing a six-picture, three-year contract at double the salary. Unfortunately, RKO went bankrupt in 1957, after which its facilities were purchased by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, becoming Desilu Studios.49 For his part, director Don Siegel was busy working on his next film, Crime in the Streets, a drama about juvenile delinquency with John Cassavetes, Mark Rydell and Sal Mineo. After it, Siegel would make films for a number of other studios, many of them for Universal, but he never worked with Wanger or Allied Artists again.

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3 The Siegel Question Don Siegel worked his way through the Hollywood system, beginning his career as a film librarian, assistant editor, montage director and second-unit director at Warner Bros., a studio that specialised in fast-paced action films, from 1934–43. According to Stuart Kaminsky, Siegel created the montage sequences for hundreds of Warner Bros. films including Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca (both 1942) and Raoul Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939) and They Drive by Night (1940).50 Siegel claimed such studio stalwarts as Curtiz and Walsh as important influences, and it is not difficult to see their economical style reflected in his work. Known primarily for his lean, efficient crime films, and for his later collaborations with actor Clint Eastwood, Siegel was comfortable working within the context of genre. The reflexive Western The Shootist (1976) with John Wayne amply demonstrates Siegel’s firm grounding within generic tradition. Similarly reflexive is the scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers where Miles peers in the window of Sally’s house as the group inside discuss a pod for her baby; the action he surreptitiously observes is framed within the frame of the window, as if Miles is watching the same frightening film we are watching. But was Siegel an auteur or, to quote the title of one of the few books about him, merely, a ‘Hollywood professional’? Some, including the nouvelle vague cinephiles, clearly thought the former: in homage, Godard gave a character the director’s name in Made in U.S.A. (1966), and during a state execution in the futuristic depersonalised society of Alphaville (1965), Lemmy Caution and Natacha von Braun must display no emotion, like Miles and Becky when they leave his office pretending to be pods. In the UK, Movie magazine, with its auteurist bias, was enthusiastic about Siegel,

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ranking him as ‘Very Talented’; but later, in his monumental book The American Cinema Andrew Sarris relegated him to the lowly category of ‘Expressive Esoterica’.51 Since then, despite the work of a few enthusiastic auteurists (Stuart Kaminsky, Alan Lovell, Judith Kass), however, the jury on Siegel has yet to reach a convincing verdict. For Lovell, ‘An account of Siegel’s films must begin with a basic situation of the man outside society.’52 Most critics writing about Siegel as an auteur see his vision as being defined by two extreme forms of behaviour, bland conformity versus ‘a wild, spontaneous, emotional, life-affirming joyousness which is, nonetheless, mad’. His protagonists are often strongly individual men who fight against the established order, as exemplified by the eponymous anti-hero of Siegel’s Charley Varrick (1973), a bank robber who describes himself as ‘the last of the independents’. Kaminsky uses the pod society of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as one term in the fundamental binary opposition (‘pod-like conformity or unfettered madness’) that he sees as informing Siegel’s vision, observing that the film became a central metaphor for life for the director.53 So, for example, Siegel philosophises that ‘To not be a pod is to look for challenges and even welcome unhappiness, to affirm your existence. Existence is ‘Keep your eyes a little wide and blank. Show no interest or excitement.’

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worthwhile as long as there is a challenge, even if you have to create that challenge.’ He describes directors who are always ‘confident’ as pods: ‘They know the right way, the safe way, the automatic way, to do each shot, each scene. They get by quite well, lead long, relatively undisturbed lives, but they never get poetry or anything lyrical.’54 This view of Siegel’s work is perhaps accurate enough, as far as it goes. Thematically, Siegel’s preoccupation with neurotic anti-heroes at odds with normative society seems to find its perfect expression in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with its once-rational scientist driven to paranoia and the edge of psychosis. Siegel had wanted to call the film ‘Sleep, No More’, in reference to Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide, because the central question of the film is whether people will remain alive, will accept the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, or succumb to the pod-state which, as Danny Kaufman describes it in the film, is for some a consummation to be devoutly desired. As Siegel puts it, ‘The pods in my picture and in the world believe they are doing good when they convert people into pods. … It leaves you with a dull world, but that, my dear friend, is the world in which most of us live.’55 Moving beyond this core binarism in Siegel’s work, Lovell argues that films such as The Lineup (1958) reveal a consistent

‘Love. Desire. Ambition. Faith. Without them life’s so simple …’

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thematic concern with ‘the ambiguity of appearances’.56 However, Siegel’s concern is in fact less epistemological than ethical. In Dirty Harry (1971), Harry’s monologue to the wounded bank robber about his .44 Magnum in the foiled heist near the beginning (‘I know what you’re thinking. Did he use 5 shots or 6? To tell you the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement’) is repeated almost verbatim in the climax, in his battle with the psychopath Scorpio (Andy Robinson), as a deliberate provocation to justify shooting him dead. Like Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), other characters in Siegel’s films are frequently engaged at some level in a performance, and this performance is always related to questions of authenticity. The plots of The Killers (1964) and Two Mules for Sister Sarah (1970), for example, hinge on characters’ performances, as does The Beguiled, which addresses performance in relation to gender – a theme that, as discussed below, it shares with Invasion of the Body Snatchers as well. Often, performance in Siegel’s films masks something duplicitous or criminal. In The Lineup, for example, law-abiding American tourists returning to the US through San Francisco carry heroin planted on them by a drugs ring, making them inadvertent smugglers passing as respectable citizens; and in Flaming Star (1960), there is a crucial, startling scene where Pacer (Elvis Presley), a halfbreed Kiowa, ceases being simply a congenial youth and spits out the truth that since childhood he has been hurt by the subtle racism of the white girl Roz (Barbara Eden), a friend whom he has always secretly liked; the resentment that has silently built up inside him justifies his subsequent rejection of white society. Telefon, which offers the most obvious connection to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, involves American citizens who have been trained, preprogrammed, as in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), as unaware sleeper terrorists who when given the trigger word will throw off their normative identities and carry out predetermined terrorist acts. Siegel made no other science fiction or horror films before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, nor would he return to these genres afterward (although perhaps one might argue for Telefon’s

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speculative premise). However, between Hell Is for Heroes (1962) and The Killers he directed episodes of several television shows, including two for Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone television series (1959–64): ‘Uncle Simon’ (first telecast 15 November 1963) and ‘The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross’(17 January 1964).57 Although The Twilight Zone often relied on the visual conventions of film noir, neither of the Siegel-directed episodes has any noteworthy visual affinities with Invasion of the Body Snatchers – they were shot with the show’s regular crew – but they do reveal some striking thematic affinities with his film work, and particularly with Invasion of the Body Snatchers. ‘Uncle Simon’, a typical Serling morality tale with a narrative twist at the end that suggests both the cruel indifference and implacability of fate and the irony of poetic justice, involves an irascible and vindictive old man (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and his repressed and bitter niece Barbara (Constance Ford). She tends slavishly to his excessive wants but is only waiting for him to die in order to inherit his ample estate as recompense for the constant abuse she suffers. After Uncle Simon suffers an accidental fall that breaks his back, Barbara offers no assistance when she realises he is dying; and so she comes into his estate – with the proviso that she must care

‘I’ll get it for you now … Uncle’ (Constance Ford as Barbara in ‘Uncle Simon’)

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for his last experiment, according to the will. The experiment turns out to be a robot of Uncle Simon, a bargain-basement version of Robby, the robot star of Forbidden Planet (1956), complete with Uncle Simon’s grating voice and unctuous personality. When still alive, Uncle Simon berated his niece for her self-effacement, at one point calling her ‘a passionless vegetable’. In the end, Barbara gets her material rewards but nevertheless has to continue in a rote, mechanical manner for the rest of her life to serve an Uncle Simon who, like Uncle Ira in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is no longer really her uncle. The episode’s penultimate shot is a tight close-up of Barbara, emphasising her entrapment, as she agrees to make the hectoring robot his customary cup of hot chocolate, saying ‘I’ll get it for you now … Uncle’ with the same flat tone of Becky’s ‘I’m in here, Miles’, after she has turned into a pod in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If Barbara has become a pod because she has sold her soul, the eponymous protagonist of ‘The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross’ Wilma becomes a pod

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(Don Gordon) ironically receives his inevitable comeuppance for buying one. Ross is a working-class hustler who, rejected by Leah (Gail Kobe), the woman he desires, discovers he has the ability to swap or buy the attributes of other people. Through a series of such deals, he becomes very rich and returns to Leah’s modest apartment, where she lives with her father, hoping to win her. But Leah still rejects him because she realises that his obsessive drive to improve himself renders him unable to love her or anyone else, and that he wants her only as another possession to bolster his own sense of selfworth. Failing to comprehend the difference – crucial, for Siegel – between performance and authentic being, a frustrated Sal pleads ‘You tell me what kind of guy you want me to be, and I’ll be that guy’. Leah’s reply, ‘You don’t care about me, not really. You don’t care about anybody’, recalls what detective Jack Farnham (Howard Duff) says in Siegel’s Private Hell 36 (1954) to his crooked partner Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran), who has stolen counterfeit money from a corpse and is ready to kill for it: ‘You don’t care about anything or anybody. You’re sick.’ In The Twilight Zone episode, Sal then hits on the idea of buying from Leah’s disapproving but impoverished father his overwhelming sense of compassion, and as a result Sal is transformed from a brutish thug into a loving and doting partner. Sal and Leah plan to marry but, unfortunately, her father, having sold his compassion, is no longer the gentle and understanding soul he had been, and because he dislikes Ross he now has no compunction about killing him. As with ‘Uncle Simon’, the episode’s twist ending suits both Serling’s sense of ironic fate and Siegel’s visions regarding performance and podism.

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4 Roots and Tendrils Stuart Kaminsky sees the blending of horror and science fiction elements as a post-World War II development in American cinema, and he positions Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a prime example of this trend.58 But the film is even more generically hybrid than he suggests. On the one hand, it is a horror movie, where the monsters are hardly glimpsed, the horror being more psychological; on the other hand, it is a science fiction film in which the aliens look like humans and go about humdrum everyday activities. Further, stylistically it resembles film noir, with its expressionist mise en scène and doomed protagonists, more than it does either of these two speculative genres. Given the film’s narrative frame, we might regard the hero of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as already doomed and dying despite anything he might do, like salesman Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) who, poisoned by radioactivity in the bleak noir D.O.A. (1950), must find his own killer before himself expiring at film’s end. Like aspiring screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard (1950),

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he might as well be narrating his own story from beyond the grave. With only Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and its ‘great whatsit’, apparently a nuclear bomb, as an uneasy precedent for combining noir and science fiction, no wonder Allied Artists was uncomfortable with the film’s comedy, which only further complicated its generic mix, and had much of it cut. Just as the pods in the film seem to confuse the gap between animal and vegetable, human and non-human, the film itself challenges the comfort of generic boundaries. As with Bedford Falls in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), so Santa Mira changes from a Norman Rockwell vision of idyllic small-town America to a noir nightmare. The film grows increasingly oppressive and threatening, structured around a series of dark and enclosed spaces, from Becky’s basement to the greenhouse to the closet in Miles’s office to the hole in the tunnel where they hide from the pursuing mob. And just as Capra’s film unexpectedly lurches from populist comedy to film noir when George Bailey (James Stewart) is shown what the town would become without him, so Invasion of the Body Snatchers slides from noir into science fiction and horror. Even before the noir stylistics become pronounced in the film, Siegel succeeds in making the mundane seem menacing, as in the scene where Miles and Becky visit Wilma. Nothing dramatic happens, but Uncle Ira seems somehow sinister in his creepy normality as he goes through the banal motions of mowing the lawn and chatting idly about the weather. When Miles and Becky go to the Belicecs’ house and see the body on the pool table, Jack describes the situation as ‘a charming, blood-curdling mystery story’, not unlike a hard-boiled detective noir – possibly the kind of pulp fiction Jack himself, like his namesake Jack Finney, might write. On the wall above the pool table hangs a framed poster that reads, astonishingly, ‘mirror noir’, a reflexive description of the film itself as a reflection of the disillusioned view of postwar American culture that informs the genre. This poster is flanked by two others, the one on the right by which Becky stands including the words ‘femme fatale’. Much of the imagery in Invasion of the Body Snatchers features elements of the noir style, beginning

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immediately with the opening shot after the credits, a police car speeding down a dark, rain-soaked urban street at night, its headlights flashing in the gloom, coming to stop at the City Emergency Hospital. Later, when the police dispatcher issues the APB for Miles and Becky, we see a montage of nine shots of patrol cars on the prowl that seem to have been lifted from a noir police procedural. (This montage is not in the final script, thus was probably added by Siegel, given his expertise in transitional montage.)59 The film’s Film noir or horror?

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multiple shots of headlights, flashlights, matches and lamps as dwindling pools of light in the engulfing darkness are images common to noir, along with the thematic sense of defeat and gloom that they suggest. When Miles creeps along the side of the Driscolls’ house at night, for example, the shadow he casts on the wall seems to dwarf him. Then, when he breaks into the basement through a small window, one shot looks through the illuminated but broken pane into the night from the darkened interior of the basement, shards of

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light and glass stabbing at the blackness in a kind of quintessential noir abstraction. Siegel also employs noir’s typically unsettling contrast of depths of field in the image by setting people off from objects or from each other in the extreme foreground and background of the mise en scène. For example, Uncle Ira is shown mowing the lawn while Wilma talks with Becky and Miles on the swing in her front yard. When Ira is out of frame we are still aware of his presence, hearing Bait … and switch

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the sound of his mower blades turning. As Miles and Becky head back to their car, we see them cross the lawn in the distance, moving toward the camera, Wilma staying near the swing in the depth of the shot, while Uncle Ira moves through the frame from left to right in the foreground, still mowing. The emotional distance Wilma feels from her beloved Uncle Ira (‘Always when he talked to me there was a special look in his eye’) is vividly captured in the emphasis on spatial distance in the composition of the shot. Similarly, the scene in Jack’s den is marvellously composed with the face of Jack’s pod body on the pool table in the foreground and bottom of the frame, and Jack himself dozing at the bar in the distance behind it. Shot in deep focus, the effect when the pod Jack opens its eyes was achieved with a clever switch of actor King Donovan on the pool table with a double at the bar, his face obscured, and then a cut as Donovan moved to the bar while his moulded pod replica (ironically) replaced him on the pool table.60 Not only does the shot elicit a frisson through its composition, it also provides a graphic representation of what is occurring narratively, Jack’s personality draining away as the pod replicant grows into consciousness and threatens to displace him. At the same time as its noir elements are pronounced, the film’s Bmovie qualities and its location shooting lend it a documentary realism (thus making the horror more palpable). After their first meeting, when Miles and Becky walk across the town’s main street, the camera tracks across the street with them in one shot, preserving time and space; a nondescript Royal Drug outlet is visible behind them, and when they part by her father’s hardware store, a sign for Flintware cookware at the price of $4.99 can be clearly seen in the shop window behind them. The period professional building that contains Miles’s office, with its narrow corridors and available light spilling in through the glass doors at the entrance, is but one example of how, in noir fashion, Invasion of the Body Snatchers combined location cinematography with expressionist lighting and mise en scène. Allied Artists acknowledged this aspect of the film in one of its press releases, which notes that ‘Locations were chosen with special care, to add to the suspenseful

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mood and “science-fact” tone of the production’ and that both Wanger and Siegel ‘believed the use of actual homes and buildings, both interiors and exteriors, would lend a necessary documentary touch to the thrilling, unusual background of the story’.61 Belton notes that Siegel’s style in the 1950s ‘is lean and economical, eschewing the expressive interplay of light and shadow The flinty doctor is about to be fired up; Location photography and expressionist mise en scène

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that characterizes the films noirs of the period’,62 which, if true, makes Invasion of the Body Snatchers all the more singularly remarkable. Some shots in Private Hell 36 – shot by Burnett Guffey, who also photographed such classic noirs as My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) and The Reckless Moment (1949) as well as the formative neo-noir Bonnie and Clyde (1967) – have shadows and chiaroscuro lighting, but not nearly to the extent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Critics are mostly in agreement that Siegel’s visual style is, as Lovell puts it, ‘characteristically simple and uncluttered’, with lighting ‘usually even and most often provided by full daylight’.63 Similarly, cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks’s preceding work in television on such programmes as The Dennis Day Show (1952) and General Electric Theater (1953–62) and in other films such as Friendly Persuasion and Sayonara (1956) hardly suggest his seeming mastery of the noir look in Invasion of the Body Snatchers; even Allied Artists’ follow-up SF film World without End, the next film Fredericks shot, was in Technicolor and CinemaScope, and John Frankenheimer’s taut thriller Seven Days in May (1964), for which Fredericks also served as director of cinematography, was more evenly lit. Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes as much from science fiction and horror as it does from noir. The premise of alien invasion

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Teaser ad

is a central trope of science fiction. The idea of a vegetable menace beyond reason, driven only to survive, is like the malign vegetablelike ‘super-carrot’ of The Thing from Another World (which also balances elements of science fiction and horror), a reference deliberately invoked by one of the teaser ads included in the studio’s pressbook for the film, which asks ‘What is the monstrous secret of the Things from Another World?’ (This uninspired ad copy is clearly a holdover from when the studio had retitled the film ‘They Came from Another World’ the previous fall.) This threat of the loss of individuality is a central theme of both dystopian science fiction and horror. The film’s protagonist, a doctor, represents the rationality of science trying to combat the monstrous threat, like Van Helsing in Dracula. But, as Kaminsky notes, the traditional weapons of horror films, either burning in fire or a stake through the heart, both of which Miles essentially uses in the film, are unable to stop the monster in this case.64 If it is the metaphorical sleep of reason that breeds monsters, it is literal sleep that allows the pods to take over

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people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Thus the film’s three basement scenes (‘I won’t be bothering you anymore’, says Charlie, the meter reader from Miles’s basement) carry overtones of menace from countless horror films where the monstrous threat emerges from the dank recesses, the dark depths of the subconscious. Because of the film’s complex generic hybridity, Allied Artists sought to situate it as both horror and science fiction. The earliest extant press release from studio publicity head John Flinn in the Walter Wanger papers that mentions Invasion of the Body Snatchers, dated 29 December 1954, describes the project as being ‘based on the Collier’s mystery serial authored by Jack Finney’. It was still described this way in studio press releases as late as 7 February 1955, less than a month before shooting was originally scheduled to begin. However, by early June, in a flash bulletin from Flinn, the film is called a ‘thriller’ and Finney’s novel is identified as ‘the most exciting science-fiction novel of the season’.65 The original trailer describes the film as being ‘the ultimate in science fiction’. Studio pressbook material for the film from the Allied Artists Exploitation Department included a suggestion to exhibitors that they contact local science fiction clubs for mailing lists, perceptively pointing out that SF magazines and books represent a significant and distinct demographic, with print runs ‘into the millions’.66 At the same time, the trailer also promotes Invasion of the Body Snatchers as offering ‘a new dimension in terror to the entire SuperScope screen’. One of the studio’s newspaper ads cleverly plays on the vegetable nature of the pod threat by warning viewers that the experience of watching the film is that ‘You’re there, in the shadow of an unseen horror that roots you to your movie seat!’ Some of the poster art for the film featured an image of McCarthy and Wynter running, but cut out from the context of the pursuing townspeople and matted into a nightmarish scenario in which they are being pursued across a flat de Chirico-like landscape, the silhouette of a city miles behind them, with giant clawed hands reaching from an ominously dark sky to grab them. This image is provided with

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various captions, including the one below left and ‘THEY come from another world! Fiendish, blood-chilling THINGS in whose dread embrace humans disappear … cell by cell … atom by atom!’ The opening day four-column ad carried the same image with the wildly hyperbolic description THEY come from another world! While the Earth sleeps IT happens! The creeping mass of doom from the stars engulfs entire towns! Incredible, insatiable cosmic hordes take over every living human! Never has the screen erupted into so monstrous a nightmare of terror!67

Pressbook ads

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Less dramatic ads of a variety of sizes depicted the couple running, with the giant claws replaced by an inexplicable large red handprint above their fleeing figures – an image that perhaps encouraged a reading of the film as a parable about the iron fist behind the Iron Curtain, the ‘Red Menace’ of Communism.

Lobby card

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5 Politics of the Pods In David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly (1986), Seth Brundle observes that ‘Insects don’t have politics. … No compassion, no compromise.’ The same is true of the pod people, who exist simply to spread their kind – ‘only the instinct to survive’, as Miles says – and who gather for this one purpose in unison in the town square. However, if the pod people have no ideology, the film itself is steeped in the overheated politics of its day, and one might safely claim that Invasion of the Body Snatchers tapped into the cultural Zeitgeist as deeply as any movie of the era. Curiously, Jack Finney denied that his novel had any political significance: ‘The book isn’t a cold war novel, or a metaphor for anything. I wrote it to entertain its readers, nothing more.’68 Finney’s comment is of course nothing if not ingenuous, especially considering the ‘fragment of a wartime speech’ invoked at the end of the novel by Miles as the pods retreat back into outer space: ‘We shall fight them in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight them in the hills; we shall never surrender.’69 As Glen M. Johnson points out, Finney had changed this ending from the original that had appeared in the serial, in which the FBI come to the rescue of Miles and Becky.70 In the film, the psychiatrist Danny Kaufman diagnoses the problem in Santa Mira as an epidemic of ‘mass hysteria’, brought on by anxiety about ‘what’s going on in the world today’; and when Miles tries to calm Wilma’s fears about her Uncle Ira, he reassures her that ‘Even these days it’s not as easy to go crazy as you might think.’ Both comments suggest the overwhelming tensions undoubtedly shared by most of the film’s viewers in 1956, and with good reason. The fears that infused the era were many: ‘the “Red Menace”, which crystallized around the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy …; learning to cope with the consequences of a modern, urban,

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technologically bureaucratized society; and the pervasive fear of atomic annihilation’ were most prominent, but there was also ‘the Korean war and the return of the brainwashed … the spiralling arms race, loyalty oaths, fallout and the rising fear of cancer, the fluoridation controversy, flying saucers and a rising interest in science fiction, cloning and the spiritual supermarket’.71 At the time Invasion of the Body Snatchers was being made, the Cold War was at its height and fears about Communism and nuclear war were rampant. In February of 1956, the same month that Invasion of the Body Snatchers opened nationwide in the US, Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Krushchev declared in a speech at the opening session of the Party Congress that nuclear war against capitalist imperialism was no longer ‘inevitable’, but that the Fields of pods

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‘new social order’ of Communism would ultimately win the Cold War. The fear of attack and destruction from the evil that lurked behind what Winston Churchill had called the Iron Curtain that separated Western from Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe created a climate of paranoia that resulted in witch-hunts to purge America of those infected with the virus of Communism. The Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated citizens suspected of harbouring Communist sympathies, including, in 1947, those in the film industry, widely regarded as liberal or left politically. Some witnesses refused to cooperate with the Committee’s investigation and were jailed, but other established figures in the industry ‘named names’ in the spirit of cooperation, to prove their loyalty as Americans, and out of personal fears and interests. The studios established an unofficial ‘blacklist’ of actors, writers and directors who had been identified as Communist sympathisers, and many careers were destroyed as a result. Among the files opened by the FBI in its investigations was one on Walter Wanger, a known liberal and supporter of various progressive causes, who was well aware of his precarious position.72 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the junior Republican senator from Wisconsin, achieved a meteoric rise to national fame at the beginning of the decade thanks to the smear tactics and unfounded accusations fuelling his scare-mongering about Communist fellow travellers and spies working in the State Department and other levels of government. Before the decline of his influence and popularity in 1954 after the televised Army-McCarthy Hearings and an appearance on Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now public affairs programme, McCarthy delivered numerous speeches warning of Communists ‘invading’ America, ‘infiltrating’ the State Department, and ‘infesting’ the Army. The depiction in Invasion of the Body Snatchers of what Miles describes as ‘a malignant disease spreading through the whole country’ recalls McCarthy’s 1951 description of Communism as ‘a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of man’.

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The pod promise of ‘no more love, no more beauty, no more pain’ evokes such grey and joyless Communists as Ninotchka (Cyd Charisse) in the following year’s Silk Stockings (1957), who, as she begins to thaw emotionally, confesses to American Steve Canfield (Fred Astaire) that ‘the arrangement of the features on your face is not displeasing to me’. Consistent with such pop-culture representations of Communists during the era, the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers lack emotion, which is here inextricably linked to capitalism. When Miles first returns to Santa Mira, driving back into town with Sally, he discovers that a local family, the Grimaldis (whom we later learn have become pods), have closed up their roadside produce stand, which Miles observes in his voice-over had been the most successful in the area. ‘He gave the stand up. … Too much work!’, Mrs Grimaldi (Eileen Stevens) explains to Miles. In the novel the pods’ enervation is explained by the revelation that they are only capable of surviving for a few years, but this point is elided in the film. Lacking ambition and the competitive spirit upon which capitalism depends, the film’s pod people no longer possess the necessary entrepreneurial drive to work. Finney’s Miles pauses to describe the shutdown shopfronts and neglected properties, but in the film this point is largely distilled

‘Too much work!’

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into Miles’s observation, ‘that littered, closed-up vegetable stand should have told me something’. While the American economy was in fact particularly strong in the 1950s, the accompanying urge to conform began to be debated during the Eisenhower years. McCarthyism was only the most bellicose expression of the postwar conformist sensibility, which was manifest in every aspect of daily life. Already in 1950 David Riesman along with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney argued in their book The Lonely Crowd that postwar American society had encouraged people to be ‘other-directed’ rather than being ‘inner-directed’, in part because of the sense of affirmation afforded by material abundance.73 A few years later, Vance Packard in the bestseller The Hidden Persuaders examined how Americans were being ‘engineered’ as consumers by modern advertising, the techniques of which, he noted, were now being effectively employed in politics and elsewhere ‘beneath the surface of American life’.74 In 1956, the same year as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, William H. Whyte published his classic study The Organization Man, in which he analysed the corporate mentality that he perceived had come to dominate the American national psyche. For Whyte this development constituted a new ‘social ethic’ that encouraged the American male to ‘collaborate with others’ and ‘sublimate himself in the group’, qualities that were regarded as important to efficient corporate functioning.75 In response to this rise in conformism, the magazine Dissent was founded in 1954 with a mandate to ‘dissent from the bleak atmosphere of conformism that pervades the political and intellectual life of the United States’,76 while the Beat Generation coalesced as a reaction against this ‘square’ culture. In his 1958 book of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote the telling lines, ‘I have wandered lonely/as a crowd’, the pun alluding at once to the Romantic intensity of Wordsworth and the experience of nature, grown increasingly remote in contemporary America, and to the simultaneous feelings of alienation and group thinking that characterised the era.77

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The pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers may be like infiltrating Communists, but they equally represent our detached and alienated neighbours. When Santa Mira’s air raid siren begins its ominous blasting, everyone in town pursues Miles and Becky up the long stairway into the hills, conflating the fears of nuclear attack and of the herd mentality which, as in the recent HUAC hearings, rooted out those who, like Miles, are deemed dissenters. At one point in Invasion of the Body Snatchers the pod people gather in the town square (Kersting Court in Sierra Madre), brought together by some silent signal, to spread the conspiracy by trucking pods to nearby towns and cities, a farm collective working with a collective consciousness. The scene manages to be at once ‘just like any other Saturday morning’, as Miles observes, viewing it through his office window, and, for critic Noel Carroll, ‘the quintessential Fifties image of socialism’.78 The very ordinariness of the scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers where ‘Uncle Ira’ mows the lawn suggests that the threat of the pods is a horrific exaggeration of what Siegel had called ‘a general state of mind that is found in everyday life’. For both Riesman and Whyte, the American Dream, embodied by the new, standardised suburban spread of Levittown housing developments across the nation,

‘Just like any other Saturday morning’

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had already become a nightmare full of Uncle Iras. The small town of Santa Mira is ‘so typical it seems an uncontaminated evocation of the American Dream’, and it is telling that Alan Lovell mis-identifies Santa Mira as ‘a typical small mid-Western town’.79 Regardless of its actual geographic location, though, it is the American heartland, a place where everyone knows each other on a first-name basis, a world of mom-and-pop businesses, a place of lawn swings, spoon bread and barbecues. It is a testament to the film’s achievement that Santa Mira could seem at once so concretely realised and, as Lovell says, so vaguely evoked as to stand in for Anytown, USA. Importantly, Santa Mira is not an actual California town, but ‘mira’ in Spanish is the command ‘to look’ which, as Kaminsky notes, ‘calls attention to itself, cries to be understood, heeded’.80 The idea of the film as a warning about a general social decline is consistent with the original ending, with Miles shouting directly to the camera, for its domestic audience would be, in the end, viewers who were collectively responsible for society being in the condition the film-makers were decrying. Kersting Court in 2010

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Bernstein claims that Mainwaring and Siegel eliminated the novel’s nostalgia for prewar America,81 but, as already suggested, this is hardly true, and in fact this remains a central concern of the film. An old-fashioned general practitioner, Miles mourns the rapid transformation of small-town life in postwar America. At the beginning, about to meet Sally at the train station, Miles passes someone named Mr Fisher on the platform and cheerfully greets him by name although he barely responds (is he already a pod?). When Miles first meets Sally, he kisses her hello on the cheek (not a particularly American custom, it bespeaks intimate friendship rather than mere acquaintance) and asks her ‘How’s Mickey and the baby?’ Without a trace of professional jealousy, he asks her why she didn’t refer the several callers to the other physicians in town, Drs Carmichael and Pursey (Everett Glass), the latter of whom had ‘brought Becky into the world’ and with whom Miles later chats amiably in the parking lot of the Sky Terrace restaurant. Miles knows and acknowledges everyone he meets, whether it’s little Johnny, a boy on the street whose hair he tousles, local police officers Nick Grivett (Ralph Dumke) and Sam Janzek (Guy Way), or Mac Lomax (Dabbs Greer), the owner of the filling station on the edge of town, where he stops to use the pay phone as he and Becky are fleeing. Anytown, USA

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In stark contrast, once everyone is transformed by the pods, they become distant, vacant, passing each other on the street without regard, a speculative extrapolation of the changing way of life in postwar America. A close-knit, harmonious society where everyone is known by name is fast becoming an impersonal world of crowds. Because pod people are indifferent to romantic gourmet dinners, the Stan Hayes Band, featured at the Sky Terrace restaurant according to the sign at the entrance, has been replaced by the impersonal, mechanical jukebox, the infernal machine responsible for ushering in a new era of raucous rock ’n’ roll and thus precipitating the death of older musical traditions and the social behaviours associated with them. Indeed, the rapid rise in popularity of the new rock ’n’ roll music among America’s youth in 1955, when Invasion of the Body Snatchers was being made, combined with fears about juvenile delinquency, as illustrated in such movies as The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando and Rebel without a Cause (1955) with James Dean, was so dramatic and pervasive that, for rock historian Ed Ward, ‘as the year progressed, parents across the country would come to regard some of their children as if they were space aliens, so strange would their behaviour become’.82

The jukebox has replaced the live band

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As the malignant disease spreads in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the pods take over the telephone company, the police and transportation, evoking the so-called ‘military-industrial complex’ about which Dwight Eisenhower would warn in his Farewell Speech to the American nation in January 1961. Once the townspeople become a mob pursuing Miles and Becky, Siegel cuts to an extreme high-angle long shot, in stark opposition to the characteristic enclosed mise en scène of the film generally. Looking down from the hilltops at the couple running toward the stairs, the image shows them dwarfed, overwhelmed by forces beyond their control and arraigned against them. Another shot from the general perspective of the pod mob shows Miles and Becky in the distance picking their way through the hills, again dwarfed in the image. Then, as they hide under the floorboards in the tunnel, they are trampled on by the mob running past – a most graphic metaphor of the flattening of individuality in the age of other-directedness. The relative proximity of the highway, when Miles finally reaches it, generates an extra horrific twist, because this nightmarish invasion is being enacted so surprisingly close to the flow of civilisation. Santa Mira is hardly as remote as the surrounding hills at first might suggest. The traffic on the highway is bumper to bumper,

Overwhelmed by the pod conspiracy, Miles and Becky are mere specks in the distant hills

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Director Don Siegel setting up a shot in the tunnel

the drivers oblivious to what is going on around them, already alienated in their unheeding rush to wherever. The anarchic opportunities of the open road, celebrated the year after Invasion of the Body Snatchers in Jack Kerouac’s Beat anthem On the Road, are already choked off, a procession of crawling cars that recalls Finney’s nostalgic lament in ‘Second Chance’ for a time ‘before people shut themselves behind great sheets of glass and metal, and began rushing along super-highways, their eyes on the white line’.83 When the trucks carrying their pod loads are dispatched from the Santa Mira town square, the towns and cities for which they are destined – Redbank, Crescent City and Valley Springs – are real California places, with the exception of Milltown (although Burkeville, near Bakersfield, was sometimes known by this name); like Santa Mira, it

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is a fictional name but one with a meaning. In the 1950s, the name could not help but recall Miltown, the brand name of the first massmarketed tranquilliser in the US, widely prescribed to Americans during the decade before being designated a controlled substance due to its potential addictiveness. The image of a medicated bourgeoisie conjured by Miltown brings the pod metaphor even closer to home. For Belton, Siegel’s décor is ‘neutral’, tending ‘to depersonalize those within it’,84 and Ted Haworth’s production design for Invasion of the Body Snatchers is, as it should be, completely unassuming. Haworth was, as Bernstein notes, ‘an expert in unpretentious realism’ in such films as Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) and that classic of American naturalism, Marty (1955).85 However, this is not to say that Haworth’s sets in the film are unnaturally uncluttered, as is Menzies’s in Invaders from Mars. Consider, for example, the tacky jello moulds displayed in a circular pattern on one wall in Miles’s house – they definitely reveal ‘a certain flair for interior design’, as the narrator condescendingly says of the Hurdanos’ homes in Buñuel’s Land without Bread (1932). The brica-brac in Jack’s den – including the fully stocked bar, African

‘a certain flair for interior design’

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carvings and drama masks, clocks, astrolabe, dartboard, gun rack and typewriter – brilliantly captures the middle-class values and lifestyle of its owners as effectively as the more stylised décor in any Sirk melodrama. Because Miles is in the end proved correct and the institutions of the state apparently mobilised in response to his warning, for Peter Biskind Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not really about the threat of Communism or conformity, but rather, about a nostalgia for a lost traditional community and the creation of a new one ‘defined by the alarmist perspective of the right’.86 But in the end, while one might read the film as a right-wing endorsement of paranoia or a leftist warning about capitalist mass culture, it is above all a centrist nostalgic lament for the fact that, to paraphrase Duke Ellington, things ain’t what they used to be. In his office soliloquy, wondering about people losing their humanity, Miles muses on how people have ‘allowed their humanity to drain away’. His meditation expresses the era’s anxieties about the failure of traditional social institutions and traditions, and perhaps even gestures toward the postmodern sensibility’s denial of the subject’s stable identity or self. The film’s

Intimations of mortality

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second scene, the first in Miles’s office, begins with a close-up of a skull X-ray (diagnosed by the good doctor as a minor concussion) in front of Miles’s face. This contemporary take on Hamlet’s ‘alas, poor Yorick’ meditation on mortality (the first of several Shakespeare references in the film) suggests that Miles’s tautological statement that ‘Uncle Ira was Uncle Ira’ is in fact not as straightforward as it seems. At the same time, as Miles looks at the skull, to his side an open window reflects a view of the town, making clear the film’s primary theme of a generalised yet pervasive deadness spreading across the land that is rendering people, in the words of Orwell’s Inquisitor O’Brien, hollow, ‘never again … capable of ordinary human feeling’.87

Miles reflects on the town’s malady

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6 The Meaning of Fear Like so many horror narratives, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is centrally concerned with questions of sexuality and gender. Indeed, the film’s ultimate horror is as intimately bound up with the dread of sexual difference and of female sexuality as it is with the other political issues of the day. Much of the contemporary discourse regarding conformity in the era, as with Riesman’s and Whyte’s books, focused on middle-class white men, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers is, of course, a man’s story since Miles is telling it in flashback. So the story he tells is not just a critique of and response to currents and anxieties in contemporary American society; it is also a primal expression of masculine horror, although fuelled by rapidly changing gender roles after World War II. Dr Miles Bennell is a man who fears commitment even as he submits to his desire. His inner conflict is mirrored by his profession: as a physician, Miles knows his patients and provides medical care for them, but at the same time, he must keep emotionally detached in order to treat them as efficiently as possible. Miles is a middle-class incarnation of the male adventurer in American fiction, in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, Melville’s Ishmael and Twain’s Huck Finn, all of whom flee to resist the threat of domesticity and the feminine. In the novel, it is only when it seems that they are to become pods that Miles realises he has been rationalising this fear: It was simple and obvious. I just hadn’t let myself see it. Of course we could have failed; I could have wrecked her life; but that made me no different from any other man who might have done the same thing.88

In the film, as in the novel, Miles uses humour as a psychic defence against opening himself up emotionally, and although this aspect of his

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character is emphasised more in the novel, it is clearly present in the film as well. For example, at the beginning of his story, when Miles is driving home from the train station with Sally, she tells him that Becky Driscoll is back in town and asks if he is interested, and he jokingly replies that ‘My interest in married women is strictly professional or yours would have been a lost cause long ago.’ But a close-up of Miles’s face, his eyebrow arching at the mention of Becky’s name, betrays his interest. Later, when Becky comments on his ‘bedside manner’, Miles suggestively replies, ‘No, Ma’am, that comes later.’ His defensive humour kicks in when they first meet: Becky apologises for coming into his office without an appointment, to which he glibly replies, ‘We’re pushing appendectomies this week.’ Only when Becky gently chides him does Miles admits that ‘maybe I clown around too much’. When Becky first enters Miles’s office, we along with Miles hear her before we see her as in the adjacent reception room she asks Sally if the doctor is in. Miles was about to exit through the backdoor of his office for lunch, but, recognising her voice, stops in his tracks, preparing for her glorious entrance. The importance of Becky’s voice here foreshadows her changed intonation later when, after becoming a pod in the tunnel, she beckons ‘I’m here, Miles’ in a disturbing monotone that LaValley describes as ‘an odd, soft voice’;89 but it also forestalls her physical presence, emphasising Miles’s sexual arousal. When she does appear for the first time, she seems almost to float through the doorway from the reception room into his office, glowing radiantly and gift-wrapped in a strapless gingham dress, a spectre emerging from Miles’s subconscious desire like Joan Bennett’s Kitty appearing out of the night in her transparent raincoat unto Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. The door through which Becky enters has the word ‘private’ etched on it, indicating the personal mixture of desire and dread she represents for Miles. It has been five years since they last saw each other, but when they meet the attraction is immediately apparent. Becky’s astonishing dress has a fitted bodice that shows off Dana Wynter’s slender figure to full advantage. Looking at her dress, one

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thinks of the ‘do-hickey’ bra designed by an aircraft engineer in Vertigo (1958), which Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) explains to Scottie (James Stewart) is designed with ‘revolutionary uplift. No shoulder straps, no back straps, but does everything a brassiere should do. It works on the principle of the cantilever bridge.’ Discussing another type of suspension, that of the spectator’s disbelief while watching classic narrative films, Richard Maltby remarks that Individual viewers or whole audiences can and often do withdraw their voluntary support for a movie’s plausibility if an alternative source of pleasure – such as pondering the hydraulics of Becky’s … strapless gingham dress in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) suggests itself.90

The dress evokes not only Miles’s desire, but also his fear: tellingly, the lace ruffles across her bosom draw erotic attention to her breasts, Becky’s glorious entrance

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and also offer a visual rhyme with the white bubbling liquid that oozes out of the pods when they burst open. Not coincidentally, the skirt Becky wears on their last night together, before she becomes a pod, also has a floral design. Some deft dialogue quickly establishes the fact that Miles and Becky were adolescent sweethearts who are both recently divorced. Both had ‘visited Reno’, a mere trip out of state all that is needed to change one’s marital status in postwar America. While Miles is immediately attracted to Becky, he is also threatened by her independence and self-assured sexuality, jokingly calling her a ‘forward wench’ when she leads him into her father’s darkened house after visiting the Belicecs. His jocular demeanour masks his underlying anger at women in general as he comments to Becky that while his ex-wife, like Becky, gets to collect alimony, he has to pay his ‘dues’, anticipating Sam’s (John Gavin) complaint to Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Psycho about ‘sweating’ to pay his ex-wife alimony while ‘she’s living on the other side of the world somewhere’. Just as in Scarlet Street Chris Cross imagines himself wielding his umbrella like a knight with his phallic lance to save his lady fair, that night Miles leaves Jack and Teddy at his house and gallantly

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rushes off into the darkness in his bathrobe to rescue Becky. The panic he feels (‘I don’t know what it was … call it a premonition, but suddenly I had the feeling that Becky was in danger. I had to get to her as quickly as possible’) expresses his own dread and desire as much as it does a concern for Becky’s welfare. Asking Becky out for dinner, Miles (slightly mis)quotes Oberon’s speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II:i) about a place ‘where the wild tyme grows’, referring to the forest outside Athens where spirits dwell and, more generally, the magical place reserved for lovers in Shakespearean comedy; and then, at the Sky Terrace club, as if being ‘ lulled in these flowers with dances and delight’, they begin to dine, drink and dance before being interrupted by Jack’s telephone call. After calling Becky a forward wench when seeing her to her door, Miles switches off the light again after she turns it on, jokingly suggesting that he should stay and tuck her in, as they are momentarily engulfed in darkness. She quickly switches the light back on again, and now it is her turn to quote Shakespeare: referencing King Lear’s speech when he is tossed out into the storm by his ungrateful daughters (III:iv),‘That way lies madness’, Becky retorts. Just as Lear is already becoming mad, so Miles is, as Becky later confesses about herself, already ‘mixed up’ by the ‘madness’ of his desire.

‘That way lies madness.’

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After Danny proffers a rational explanation for all the strange events of the evening, Becky spends the night at Miles’s house along with Jack and Teddy. Of course the Production Code prevented the film making it explicit that Miles and Becky have slept together, but the innuendo is thick. (Similarly, after they spend the next night in Miles’s office, after Miles finally professes his love and kisses Becky, the scene fades to an ashtray filled with cigarette butts the next morning.) Despite the frights of the previous evening, the next scene depicts a bright sunny morning in the kitchen. Carmen Dragon’s typically pounding, ominous score is here noticeably soft and romantic. Miles enters as Becky is frying eggs and brewing coffee at the stove, and kisses her. Quickly they have fallen into conventional gender roles, Becky commenting that she regularly made breakfast for her husband when she was married and offering to make Miles’s eggs just how he likes them. Jack enters the kitchen, broadly smiling,

‘How do you like your eggs?’

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smirking rather, as he says good morning to them both. He asks Miles if he and Teddy can stay for a while before going home and, with hands on hips and a smug grin on his face that oozes masculine camaraderie, adds in a subtle wink-wink nudge-nudge manner, ‘Or do you have … a … something else in mind?’ Taking coffee served by Becky for Teddy, Jack says, ‘Thank you, doll’ – the word at once placing Becky into her assumed ‘female’ role and foreshadowing her fate in the tunnel. The image of Dana Wynter in blue jeans and a man’s shirt at the stove in this scene was so evocative that, among the exploitation strategies exhibitors might employ with the film, Allied Artists suggested a merchandising tie-in and furnished a photo of her dressed in this casual way cooking at a Tappan gas range and holding a loaf of Wonder Bread, already an icon of middle-American blandness and normativity.91 The last image we see of Becky before she turns into a pod is a brief shot of her in the tunnel crouching at a pool of water to wash ‘Do you have something … else in mind?’

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The White Rock Girl in the 1950s

her face. The image looks similar (a ‘mirror image’, in fact, as she is facing the water from the opposite direction) to the image of Psyche, in Greek mythology a mortal woman of exceptional beauty, that served as the White Rock logo on bottles of mineral water. An American beverage company established in 1871 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, White Rock was bottling and distributing natural spring water throughout the US before the turn of the century. The Psyche image was established as the company’s trademark in 1894, and certainly the image would have been familiar to millions of American moviegoers. Indeed, in 1927 Charles Lindbergh commenced his famous transatlantic solo flight from New York to Paris by breaking a bottle of White Rock water over his plane, ‘The Spirit of St Louis’. The ‘White Rock Girl’, as she was known, was inspired by German artist Friedrich Paul Thumann’s painting ‘Psyche at Nature’s Mirror’,

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and is meant to represent her as embodying purity and the soul. Of course, while Becky is certainly beautiful, she is not pure in the virginal sense – of this Miles is fully aware – but as her erotically dreamy entrance reveals, she represents the challenges of a fresh start, a new beginning, wiping the slate clean for Miles. Indeed, it is in large part the very freshness she exudes that makes her transformation at this moment so effectively creepy. The evocation of purity despoiled represented by Becky’s transformation is perfectly embodied by Wynter, described by one journalist as ‘a continentally sexy type but with a finishing school look’.92 On their way into the Sky Terrace restaurant, Miles and Becky kiss, and Miles identifies her through it (‘Hmm. You’re Becky Driscoll’), preparing for the film’s biggest frisson. When Miles kisses the pod Becky and realises she has changed, Siegel inserts two pairs of alternating close-ups of them, accompanied by Dragon’s heavy notes, which are among the most memorable in cinema. In the first shot of Becky, from Miles’s point of view, her lids open surreally slowly, languidly indifferent, her face dappled with – water from the pool? pod foam? – making it seem almost pristine, a horrible version of the ‘doll’ that just the day before Jack had condescendingly called her. Reading the film through Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory, Thomas Byers

‘Hmm. You’re Becky Driscoll.’

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observes that this moment is so frightening because her gaze ‘is not so much at Miles as through or beyond him’, signifying a disturbing autonomy on her part.93 The following shot of Miles’s stolid yet horrified face smeared with muddy water dripping from the end of his nose, hair clotted with mud, is a powerful expression of the male

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horror of female sexuality as abject. The tunnel, as Nancy SteffenFluhr notes, represents female sexuality, and throughout the scene is associated with dirt and death.94 When the couple hide in the pit under the floorboards, they seem to entwine in a sexual embrace; but at the same time it is as if they are in a grave where none do there embrace. Even as effectively frightening as this scene is, there is a narrative illogic here of huge proportions, especially peculiar given that the film otherwise possesses such admirable dramatic unity, that ought to mitigate its power. The film makes it clear that there must be a physical proximity between a pod and its victim, although we do not see the exact method of takeover and what happens to the bodies of the people replaced. (Miles surmises in the greenhouse, ‘probably the original is destroyed or disintegrates’, although the film never actually shows the process.) When Miles eavesdrops through the window at Sally’s house, she says she will put the pod in the baby’s playpen, not just near it, so that ‘there’ll be no more tears’. When Miles and Becky are restrained in his office, Danny tells him ‘Your new bodies are growing in there’ in the next room. If they didn’t need to be in physical proximity to the pods to be replicated, then there would be no reason to keep Miles and Becky in the office in the first

A pod for the baby’s playpen

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place. Or for Mac Lomax, the filling-station owner, to put two pods in the trunk of Miles’s car. Or for Charlie, the meter reader, to plant them in Miles’s basement or greenhouse. Or, indeed, to ship pods out of town. Furthermore, not only is Becky inexplicably changed to a pod in the cave because she fell asleep for mere seconds, but her pod replacement is fully dressed in the same clothes she had been wearing, even though until this point the pods have only duplicated the organic matter of naked human bodies. We might think that Becky has been replaced because back at the greenhouse, when Miles destroys his pod duplicate, he hesitates with the pitchfork over Becky’s duplicate, unable to impale it because of its resemblance to the woman he loves (although it is possible he does so when the film cuts back to Becky inside the house at the telephone). Still, however, it makes no narrative sense, and we would have to wait until Philip Kaufman’s remake twenty-two years later to see a more sensible explanation of the pod duplicate rising from the ground as the original woman implodes to dust. Why this astonishing narrative lapse in a film that is otherwise so tightly scripted? In analysing a scene from American Gigolo (1980) in which star Richard Gere appears nude, Peter Lehman observes that at the point at which Gere’s genitals are visible the film violates classical editing conventions by cutting to an extreme long shot. Lehman argues that to show the penis threatens to demystify the phallus as a concept of masculine power, and because to do so is therefore threatening to the male spectator, the unmotivated cut to the extreme long shot is a hysterical response to this threat, a literal retreat that attempts to minimise the ideological damage.95 The otherwise inexplicable narrative lapse in Invasion of the Body Snatchers similarly makes sense as a masculine hysteria made manifest in the text. Given such a reading, Miles’s remarkable voice-over comment as he flees from the pod Becky that ‘I never knew the meaning of fear until I kissed Becky’ (a line that tends to elicit laughter from contemporary audiences) is perfectly sensible: for what could be more horrifying to a red-blooded

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American man, which is just how Miles earlier describes himself, than a beautiful and alluring woman staring back indifferently after his intimate expression of desire? In short, Becky’s refusal to be seduced by Miles’s kiss makes her nothing less than a monstrous embodiment of the more independent woman in postwar America. Uttering his comment about the meaning of fear as he scrambles from the tunnel, Miles adds that ‘I ran as little Jimmy Grimaldi had done the other day’, now like a frightened boy, that is, ‘unmanned’. ‘I ran as little Jimmy Grimaldi had done the other day.’

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The kiss serves Siegel as a gesture of authenticity rather than performance. Most notably, in the opening scene of Charley Varrick the titular protagonist (Walter Matthau), a former crop duster turned small-time bank robber with his wife, halts his car during their escape from the inevitable heist gone wrong when he realises that she has been fatally wounded in a shootout with police and, despite the urgency of the moment, waits until she dies and then kisses her slowly and tenderly. Siegel has said of the tunnel scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, What I thought was quite delicious was our playing with the fact that as a pod you don’t feel any passion. So, when McCarthy comes back to the cave and she falls, he tries to kiss her awake in a delicious non-pod way but she’s a limp fish and he knows immediately that she is a pod,

adding ‘In my life, I’m sorry to say, I have kissed many pods.’96 Siegel fails to consider the possibility, however remote, that he is not a very good kisser, that he just may not turn every woman on. Instead, the film-maker, in whose films women have a decidedly marginal place, like the film, like so many horror films, disavows the possibility of masculine inadequacy or anxiety and projects it onto woman as Other. Noting the shared depiction of sexual betrayal in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Killers, Two Mules for Sister Sarah and the female group in The Beguiled, Kaminsky concedes that Siegel seems to believe that men who commit themselves to a relationship with a woman are eventually and inevitably betrayed and destroyed.97 Julian (Robert Keith), one of the two killers in The Lineup, barks to the woman he is holding hostage, ‘See, you cry. That’s why you have no place in society. Women are weak’, as we see demonstrated in Invasion of the Body Snatchers when Miles and Becky attempt to pass as pod persons – ‘show no emotion’, he coaches her – but she gives them away, her first betrayal, by crying out when a dog in the road is almost hit by a passing truck. Miles and Becky’s relationship was sufficiently disturbing not only to Miles but to contemporary sensibilities as well, at least

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according to the perspective of the Production Code Administration (PCA). A string of letters from Geoffrey Shurlock, who took over as head of the PCA after his superior, Joseph Breen, retired in October 1954, addressed his concern with the script’s depiction of the couple. In the first letter, dated 21 February 1955, Shurlock begins by saying that ‘this basic story seems acceptable under the requirements of the Production Code’, but then raises a few concerns regarding potential violence, irreverence in a line invoking God’s name (subsequently deleted), and suggests that all references to Miles and Becky as being divorced be removed as ‘there seems to us not to be any particular story point involved’ and to avoid any ‘offensive’ innuendo in Jack’s dialogue in the breakfast scene. After reviewing a revised script, in a letter dated 8 March Shurlock again expressed his concern about a potential sexual subtext in the breakfast scene and about the characters being divorced, suggesting that if the film-makers feel it is crucial for Miles’s character to have been married before, it could be explained that his wife had died. Shurlock’s letter of 23 March, after he had read the final revised script dated 17 March, reiterates the same concerns. A final letter dated 31 March indicates a

Fade in to Saturday morning: Did they or didn’t they?

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continued concern about the characters’ divorces and the fact that Shurlock had had a telephone conversation with Wanger to discuss the matter.98 Wanger seems to have ignored these communiqués, wisely refusing to eliminate these references which are, after all, absolutely crucial to the film.

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7 Bad Seeds By the 1950s, the real and potential horrors of the nuclear age and Cold War anxieties made Bram Stoker’s middle-European Count begin to seem somewhat dated,99 and the apocalyptic vision of movies such as Beginning of the End (1957), The World, the Flesh and Devil (1959), and On the Beach (1959) offered more timely cautionary parables about the once unthinkable transition to the end of the world as we knew it in Eisenhower America. More appropriate to the terrors of potential nuclear and biological annihilation have been apocalyptic visions of undead legions. Horror movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers exploit Stoker’s association of Dracula with the plague or contagion, but imagine the infection on a national or even global rather than personal scale. In this sense Invasion of the Body Snatchers anticipates the numerous later zombie movies that followed after the cult success of Night of the Living Dead (1968), most of which depict the cause as a highly contagious infection – like ‘a malignant disease spreading through the whole country’. It is no surprise, then, that Invasion of the Body Snatchers has inspired at least three remakes, each in its own way reinterpreting the basic conceit of the original. Together the three remakes explore questions of technology, gender, selfhood and alienation raised in the original film but cast these in new contexts, demonstrating the story’s continued relevance for contemporary viewers. In the first, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of the same name, the setting is changed from a small town to a big city, San Francisco – one of the major urban destinations of the truckloads of pods on the main highway in the original – to suggest that the general social malaise the original film had warned about is already the characteristic state of affairs in modern, urban America. The malignant disease has already spread beyond sleepy rural America, from the heartland to the hub of

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the nation. At the end, pods are already being delivered to relatives of those changed as far away as Vancouver, Canada, and we see pallets of pods being loaded onto a big merchant ship bound for unspecified foreign ports. The screenplay was written by W. D. Richter, who subsequently wrote the similarly revisionist version of Dracula (1979) with Frank Langella as the seductive Count, designed for a more sexually liberated audience. Kaufman’s version tellingly moves the action not just to any American city, but to San Francisco, known then as a centre of countercultural lifestyles, including sexually liberated ones, the city serving as an acknowledged mecca for gays, thus allowing the film to offer an ironic critique of me-generation hedonism and the culture of narcissism.100 In this sense, his film is not so much a remake as a sequel, as Kaufman has said. In the narrative, Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), who works for the San Francisco Department of Health, confides to her

Podism is in full bloom by 1978

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supervisor, Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), her concern about her suddenly distant boyfriend, Geoffrey (Art Hindle). The first character to become a pod, he is characterised from the very beginning as someone aloof from his wife, listening to his stereo headphones and watching sports on television instead of interacting with her, insulated and alienated from the world by escaping into the mass media. The only discernible difference when he becomes a pod is that he no longer wants to have sex. Kaufman expertly uses overlapping dialogue throughout the film to show how people fail to hear each other in their self-absorbed routines. Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum), still a writer but now a bitter, aspiring one, makes his living running a combination mud bath and massage parlour in the city’s Tenderloin district with his wife, Nancy (Veronica Cartwright, who would return in The Invasion as Wendy Lenk, a patient of Dr Carol Bennell who claims her husband is no longer her husband). They find the pod body on a rubdown table rather than a pool table, further associating the pods with connotations of anonymous and impersonal pleasure. (‘Don’t touch it! You don’t know where it’s been!’ Nancy warns Jack.) This version’s psychiatrist, Dr David Kibner (perhaps the name change from Kaufman was to avoid confusing the character’s name with that of the director), the reasoned voice of pod existence, sees the 1970s as being marked by a return to the withdrawn lack of awareness characteristic of the McCarthy era. Kibner’s poppsychology rationalisation for the rash of people claiming that their partners seem different views this as evidence of a trend of ‘unstable relationships’, updating Danny Kaufman’s explanation in the original: ‘People are stepping in and out of relationships too fast because they don’t want the responsibility’, he tells Elizabeth. That’s why marriages are going to hell. … You’re jumping to a very bizarre conclusion: that this man you live with has been replaced by somebody else. Isn’t it more likely that you want to believe he’s changed because you’re really looking for an excuse to get out?

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Leonard Nimoy as pop-psych author Dr David Kibner

Introduced at a book signing for his new bestseller, an ‘I’m OK–You’re OK’-type self-help book, Kibner’s interpretation is as relevant today as when the film was first released. Significantly, Kibner is played by Leonard Nimoy, famous for his role as the rational, emotionless Vulcan science officer in the original Star Trek television series (1966–9), so he makes an ideal pod spokesperson. The wonderful irony of his role in Invasion of the Body Snatchers is that Nimoy’s stolid presence on screen means that he appears no different once he has been changed. Kaufman’s version is more paranoid than its predecessor. This time we are implicated at the beginning, not merely addressed in the climax, as we assume the aliens’ pre-pod point of view while they float through space toward their new target, Earth. Clearly the triumph of

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the pods is more imminent now: Kevin McCarthy is still on the road, warning people that ‘They’re coming! They’re already here!’, jumping to his death in front of a taxi driven by a pod driver played by none other than Don Siegel. The film leaves no doubt about whether humans or pods will win the battle – or, indeed, who has already won it. As Jack observes when still human and trying to escape, ‘The CIA? The FBI? They’re all pods already.’ The Transamerica Pyramid, the tallest building in the city, looms omnipresently, as if to suggest late capitalism has continued the draining away of humanity that Miles had perceived decades earlier. Although Matthew valiantly fights off the pod people and sets fire to a huge greenhouse growing them, as Miles does in the novel, he nevertheless becomes a pod himself at the end, denouncing Nancy, who tries Miles’s strategy of ‘passing’ as one of the new silent majority. In the film’s last shot, the camera zooms into the blackness of the pod Matthew’s open mouth, an empty maw, as he emits the eerie pod shriek and denounces Nancy to the others. This final chilling camera movement ends cinematographer Michael Chapman’s frequent use of the zoom in the film which, as Annette Insdorf has pointed out, flattens space as a parallel to what is happening to the characters.101

Matthew (Donald Sutherland) betrays Nancy in the final shot of the 1978 version

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Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993) offers a radical recasting of the basic narrative, picking up on Jack’s suggestion that the government is controlled by pods by setting the story on an American army base, where the body snatchers have already taken root. The protagonist is a teenage girl, Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar), whose father (Terry Kinney) is a scientist visiting the base with his family while he conducts some tests on the nearby toxic dump for the Environmental Protection Agency. The main horror strategy of the film is that the military mentality, emphasising collective action and unthinking obedience to orders, makes it impossible to distinguish professional soldiers from those who are pods – a subversive approach used years earlier to better effect by George A. Romero in The Crazies (Code Name: Trixie, 1973). R. Lee Ermey, whose most memorable role has been as the bellicose and abusive Sgt Hartman in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), plays General Platt, the base’s commanding officer. Again in uniform, he is here muted, playing against type at the beginning, barely suppressing his anger at the prying egghead with whom he has been ordered to cooperate. Yet when he changes, of course, he appears no different.

The military pods calmly close in on Major Collins (Forest Whitaker)

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Marti provides the narrative voice-over, which begins by introducing her family, including her stepmother, Carol (Meg Tilly), who, she says, has ‘replaced’ her mom. The pods vaguely represent family tensions from the perspective of the rebellious teenager. At one point during a family argument Marti says she cannot wait until she is able to leave home, and her father snaps back that she is free to leave right now. Later, Marti is forced to shoot her pod father in self-defence, enacting her resentment toward this unfeeling adult, and even to drop her little brother, Andy (Reilly Murphy), now a pod, from the helicopter in which she has escaped the base with the pilot, Tim (Billy Wirth), with whom she has developed a romantic relationship. Nevertheless, the pods function primarily as a metaphor for the military mentality. Close-ups of impassive soldiers’ faces unthinkingly obeying orders with an automatic ‘Yes, sir’ make it impossible to say just when they became pods. The pod spokesperson, Gen. Platt, recites insect politics when he tells Marti’s father that ‘When all is conformed, there will be no more disputes. It’s the race that’s important, not the individual.’ The pods’ fascist ideology is shown when all of the

Marti (Gabrielle Anwar) and Tim (Billy Wirth) pretending to be pods

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children in Andy’s daycare group hold up their finger-paintings, and they are exactly the same. In Ferrara’s version, the spread of the pods results in a form of martial law, but now it is the pods in the form of the military that impose it, not humans trying to combat them. In the climax, Marti and Tim escape in a helicopter as Gen. Platt dispatches a convoy of trucks loaded with pods to other military bases around the country (including Fort Bliss in Texas, the name as ironically resonant as the destination of Milltown in the original film). Tim and Marti use the missiles on the helicopter to destroy the base and the departing convoy. But if such heroic action suggests an upbeat conclusion, the ending is as open as that of Siegel’s film. At the end, as Marti and Tim land their helicopter at another base, we see a soldier on the ground wearing sunglasses and stiffly signalling them in. In the final shot, we see this figure from a slightly low angle standing at attention, unmoving, with the sun peeking through the dark clouds in the sky behind him: an ambiguous image that at once suggests an archetypal image of heroic American vigilance, conviction and military might, and a chilling signifier of the already doomed struggle of humanity against the victorious pods. In Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Invasion, the threat of the pods is less about sexuality than gender. Gen. Platt’s declaration that ‘When all is conformed, there will be no more disputes’ is enacted here on the global level, implicating aggressive masculinity as the root of human conflict and misery. There are no pods here, but the infection is an intelligent virus brought back to Earth on the space shuttle, which has crashed upon re-entry, scattering debris across the American northeast. As with STDs, the infection is transmitted when the virus enters the bloodstream, and the pod people infect others by spewing green bile directly into their faces or their coffee. The protagonist, Dr Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman), is both a single mother and a psychiatrist in Washington, DC, the nation’s centre of power. As she tries to balance her professional and parental roles, Carol’s fear of losing her son Oliver (Jackson Bond) to her

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ex-husband Tucker (Jeremy Northam) is realised when Tucker, who works for the Centre for Disease Control and is one of the first infected, discovers that Oliver has a natural immunity that threatens the spreading hegemony of the pods and so abducts him. At the same time as Carol struggles to rescue Oliver and escape, she develops a romantic relationship with her friend, Dr Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig), who helps her fight against the pods until, like Becky Driscoll in Siegel’s film, he is changed. The masculine propensity for violence is made explicit when Ben takes Carol to a dinner party at the home of his friends, Dr Henryk Belicec (Josef Sommer), a Czech diplomat, and his wife, Ludmilla (Celia Weston). Welcoming her, Henryk says he is delighted to be around some ‘real people’ tonight, referring to the typical posturing of politicians he knows so well. At dinner, the Russian ambassador, Yorish (Roger Rees), trades barbs with Belicec regarding the Czech Republic’s former status as a Soviet satellite. Their witty insults hardly disguise their mutual hatred forged by the political histories of the two nations; as Yorish explains, ‘My cheeky friend Dr Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) protects her son as the pods close in

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and I pretend to enjoy ourselves, but secretly we are bitter rivals … . An air of civility hides our true self-interest.’ He goes on to philosophise that civilisation itself is but a sham, people being at the core little better than animals, and tries to imagine a world ‘where every crisis did not result in a new atrocity’, but concludes that this could only happen if people ceased to be human. Carol counters that while we may still retain some animal instincts, surely humanity has progressed over time, but the film shows that Yorish’s view is entirely correct: as the infection spreads around the globe, political regimes relinquish their aggressive postures and reach new, previously unimaginable peace accords, beginning with Kim Jong-il and North Korea joining the world community, a resolution of the Middle East conflict and rapprochement between former enemies George Bush and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Of course, the political is also personal, as indicated by Carol’s relationship with Ben. Playing off the breakfast scene in the original film, on the morning after a pod person has tried to break into Carol’s home, Ben is there in her kitchen for emotional support, cooking her breakfast – a sorry plate of dessicated, blackened pancakes. The gender reversal of the roles of the romantic leads, signalled by Carol and Ben’s last names, is an indication of the film’s ostensibly progressive gender theme. Carol proudly defines herself as a ‘postmodern feminist’ in the key dinner scene, and the pods also represent the psychiatrist’s own projected fears of patriarchal control of women’s maternal function rather than, as in the original film, patriarchal fear of it. Early on we see a shot, from her point of view, of the contested custody agreement concerning Oliver on her desk. Later, as the pod Tucker stalks Carol and Oliver, his speech is not a calm argument for podism, as in the three earlier versions, but an angry diatribe about how the failure of their marriage and family was due to her careerism (‘I was third on your list. That can’t happen in our world’). Carol’s struggle to stay awake – she has already become infected and is trying not to fall asleep until Ben and the rest of the evacuated medical staff can develop a cure – becomes

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a struggle to be vigilant in resisting the patriarchal pressures to be dutiful wife first. However, despite The Invasion’s seeming critique of patriarchy, it has the least ambiguous and most upbeat ending of the four film versions. Although this is the only version in which the pod takeover clearly spreads on a global scale, a cure is found for the pod infection from Oliver’s blood, and a vaccine quickly developed that is sprayed like insecticide by crop dusters on the infected populations. All the infected people, we are told in the coda, have awakened as if from a deep sleep, remembering nothing; conveniently, there is little trauma, and Carol and Ben are now married. We see Ben at the kitchen table, with wedding ring, reading a newspaper and commenting on the fact that there are ‘eighty-three more deaths in Baghdad’, a clear indication that the world is returning to its previously violent state of affairs. The only ambiguous note in the ending of this version is the extent to which Ben may be permanently hobbled by the bullet Carol shot into his kneecap after he had become a pod. In the final shot, the camera tracks in to Carol’s painfully resigned face as she recalls Dr Bennell flees the underground conspiracy of the pods

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Yorish’s earlier words. To be married to a postmodern feminist requires the metaphoric castration of the husband. It is no wonder that Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been interpreted as a political parable about both Communist infiltration and domestic conformity, about me-generation indulgence, the military mindset, and gender conflict and sexual anxiety. As Raymond Durgnat has noted, the story’s ‘simplicity intersects with all sorts of suggestions and themes’, eliciting a ‘delirium of interpretation’.102 In Finney’s novel, the character of Dr J. Bernard Budlong, a scientist at the local college, delivers, at length, the necessary exposition of the story’s speculative premise and the nature of the pods. Budlong is wisely eliminated from the film – Finney himself wrote that ‘If you had ever read science fiction, you’d know that the dullest part is always the explanation. It bores the reader and clutters up the story103 – and his disquisition considerably condensed and incorporated into Danny Kaufman’s speech in Miles’s office. Yet Miles’s hypothesis, as the two couples stare in awe at the popping pods in his greenhouse, that ‘So much has been discovered in these past years that anything is possible’ is sufficiently general to allow for multiple treatments. Today, in the era of late capitalism and corporate globalisation, and with genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics and the internet more the stuff of science fact than science fiction, we have the ability to reproduce ourselves and be reproduced as never before. Given these new technologies, we should expect the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to remain relevant and compelling for viewers, and that there will be yet further remakes in the future.

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Notes 1 D. A., ‘Science-Fiction Tale Exciting Most of the Way’, Los Angeles Times (2 March 1956); F. J., Daily Film Reviewer (London) (23 August 1956); Boxoffice (6 February 1956). The latter two reviews are reprinted in Al LaValley (ed.), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Rutgers Films in Print 14) (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 168 and 167, respectively. 2 Showmen’s Trade Review (25 February 1956), p. 2. 3 Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 446. 4 Alan Lovell, Don Siegel: American Cinema (London: BFI, 1975), p. 15. 5 Danny Peary, Cult Movies (New York: Delta, 1981), p. 158. 6 Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Delta, 1966), p. 213. 7 Jack Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (New York: Dell, 1961), p. 1. 8 Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, p. 96. 9 Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, p. 179. 10 Murray Pomerance, ‘Introduction’, in Murray Pomerance (ed.), American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 2. 11 Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, p. 163. 12 Peary, Cult Movies, p. 157. 13 John Baxter, Science Fiction in the Cinema (New York: Paperback Library, 1970), p. 100.

14 Bernstein, Walter Wanger, p. 309. 15 John Belton, ‘Don Siegel’, in JeanPierre Coursodon with Pierre Sauvage, American Directors, vol. 2 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), p. 336. 16 Jack Finney, ‘I’m Scared’, in The Third Level (New York: Rinehart, 1957), p. 46. 17 Arthur LeGacy, ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Metaphor for the Fifties’, Literature/Film Quarterly vol. 6 no. 3 (1978), p. 287. 18 Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, p. 38. 19 LaValley, Invasion, p. 3. 20 Stuart Kaminsky, Don Siegel, Director (New York: Curtis Books, 1974), p. 99. 21 Guy Braucourt, ‘Interview with Don Siegel’, in William Johnson (ed.), Focus on the Science Fiction Film (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 75. 22 Bernstein, Walter Wanger, p. 304. 23 Patrick McGilligan (ed.), Backstory 2: Interview with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 193. 24 McGilligan, Backstory 2, p. 193. Mainwaring also wrote the screenplay for Spacemaster X-7 (1958), about a fastspreading virus brought back from outer space by a probe, its premise clearly suggesting the influence of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 25 Walter Wanger manuscript collection, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Box 82, Folder 25. 26 LaValley, Invasion, p. 25. 27 Kaminsky, Don Siegel, Director, p. 104; Stuart Kaminsky, ‘Kaminsky on Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, Cinefantastique vol. 2 no. 3 (Winter 1973), p. 22; Allied Artists Memo, n.d., in the production

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file on the film, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. 28 Bernstein, Walter Wanger, p. 308. 29 Wanger collection, Release #3938, Box 83, Folder 4. 30 Wanger collection, Box 83, Folder 2. The memo is reprinted in LaValley, Invasion, pp. 129–32. 31 Bernstein, Walter Wanger, p. 309. 32 LaValley, Invasion, p. 126. 33 Memo of 22 April 1955. Wanger collection, Box 82, Folders 25, 26. See also Bernstein, Walter Wanger, p. 310. 34 Wanger collection, Box 83, Folder 3. See also LaValley, Invasion, pp. 135–40. 35 Wanger collection, Box 83, Folder 3. See also Bernstein, Walter Wanger, p. 311. 36 Wanger collection, Box 83, Folder 2. Wanger’s memo to himself following this screening is reprinted in LaValley, Invasion, p. 142. 37 LaValley, Invasion, p. 126. 38 Wanger collection, Box 83, Folder 2. 39 Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, History of the American Cinema, vol. 6: 1940–1949 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 340–1. 40 Linda May Strawn, ‘Steve Broidy’, in Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn (eds), Kings of the Bs: Working within the Hollywood System (New York: Dutton, 1975), p. 272. 41 Wanger collection, Box 82, Folder 26. 42 Wanger collection, Box 83, Folder 2. 43 LaValley, Invasion, p. 25; Bernstein, Walter Wanger, p. 307. Sierra Madre also served as a location for many other

films and television programmes, including a dozen one-reelers by D. W. Griffith between 1910–12. See Phyllis Chapman, ‘Early Sierra Madre Was “Hub” of Movies’, Sierra Madre News (8 March 1984), p. 10. 44 Inter-office memo, 31 August 1955 from Richard Heermance to AA Legal Department, Wanger collection, Box 82, Folder 25. 45 Memo to Walter Mirisch dated 26 September 1955, Wanger collection, Box 83, Folder 2; memo dated 20 September 1955, Box 83, Folder 2. 46 AA inter-office memo from Ralph Branton, Wanger collection, Box 82, Folder 26. 47 Memo from Wanger dated 8 July 1955, Wanger collection, Box 83, Folder 2. Also see LaValley, Invasion, p. 137. 48 Memo to Walter Mirisch dated 9 December 1955, Wanger collection, Box 82, Folder 26. 49 Bernstein, Walter Wanger, pp. 315–16. 50 Kaminsky, Don Siegel, Director, p. 27. 51 Movie no. 1 (June 1962), p. 9; Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 137–8. 52 Lovell, Don Siegel, p. 13. 53 Stuart M. Kaminsky, American Film Genres (Dayton, OH: Pflaum, 1979), pp. 177, 180. 54 Siegel, quoted in Kaminsky, Don Siegel, Director, pp. 104–5. 55 Siegel, quoted in Kaminsky, Don Siegel, Director, p. 104. 56 Lovell, Don Siegel, p. 24. 57 Kevin McCarthy starred in a firstseason episode, ‘Long Live Walter Jameson’, as a history teacher with the

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power of immortality, although Siegel did not direct it. All three episodes are included in the CBS DVD The Twilight Zone: The Complete Definitive Collection (2006). 58 Kaminsky, American Film Genres, p. 114. 59 LaValley, Invasion, p. 119. 60 Bernstein, Walter Wanger, p. 308. 61 Wanger collection, Pressbook GSA 71/22. 62 Belton, ‘Don Siegel’, p. 337. 63 Lovell, Don Siegel, p. 27. 64 Kaminsky, American Film Genres, p. 110; Kaminsky, Don Siegel, Director, p. 106. 65 Wanger collection, Release #3773, Box 83, Folder 4; Release #3831, Box 83, Folder 4. 66 Wanger collection, Pressbook GSA 71/22. 67 Wanger collection, Pressbook GSA 71/22. 68 LeGacy, ‘Invasion’, p. 287. 69 Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, p. 189. 70 Glen M. Johnson, ‘“We’d Fight … We Had To”: The Body Snatchers as Novel and Film’, Journal of Popular Culture vol. 13 no. 1 (Summer 1979), p. 12. 71 Stuart Samuels, ‘The Age of Conspiracy and Conformity: Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, in John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson (eds), American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York: Ungar, 1979), p. 206; LeGacy, ‘Invasion’, p. 292. 72 Bernstein, Walter Wanger, pp. 268–9. 73 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American

Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965). 74 Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Pocket Books, 1963), pp. 2, 7. 75 William H. Whyte, Jr, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), pp. 7–8. 76 Dissent vol. 1 no. 1 (Winter 1954), pp. 3–4. 77 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, ‘Autobiography’, in Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), p. 61. 78 Noel Carroll, quoted in Peary, Cult Movies, p. 157. 79 Paul Outhwaite, Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Don Siegel (Middlesborough: D. M. Cinema Productions, 2006), p. 10; Lovell, Don Siegel, pp. 14, 22. 80 Kaminsky, ‘Kaminsky on Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, p. 19. 81 Bernstein, Walter Wanger, p. 305. 82 Ed Ward, ‘The Fifties and Before’, in Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll (New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1986), p. 98. 83 Finney, The Third Level, p. 156. 84 Belton, ‘Don Siegel’, p. 337. 85 Bernstein, Walter Wanger, pp. 306–7. 86 Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 144. 87 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 211. 88 Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, p. 166. 89 LaValley, Invasion, p. 100.

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90 Richard Maltby and Ian Craven, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), p. 333. 91 Wanger collection, Pressbook GSA 71/22. 92 Neil Rau, ‘ “The Censors Can’t Clean This One Up” ’, Los Angeles Examiner (1 May 1955), production file on the film, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. 93 Thomas Byers, ‘Kissing Becky: Masculine Fears and Misogynist Moments in Science Fiction Films’, Arizona Quarterly vol. 45 no. 3 (Autumn 1989), p. 84. 94 Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, ‘Women and the Inner Game of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, in LaValley, Invasion, pp. 217, 211. 95 Peter Lehman, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 13–19. 96 Quoted in Kaminsky, Don Siegel, Director, p. 106; Kaminsky, ‘Kaminsky on Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, p. 23.

97 Kaminsky, American Film Genres, p. 196. 98 MPAA file on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. 99 Robin Wood, ‘Burying the Undead: The Use and Obsolescence of Count Dracula’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), p. 378. 100 See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Warner Books, 1979). 101 Annette Insdorf, ‘Seeing Doubles’, Musuem of the Moving Image website, . 102 Raymond Durgnat, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Re-issue)’, Films and Filming (February 1969), pp. 49–50. 103 Jack Finney, ‘Behind the News’, The Third Level, p. 115.

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Credits Invasion of the Body Snatchers USA/1956

Special Effects Milt Rice 80 minutes

Directed by Don Siegel © Allied Artists Pictures Corporation Production Company Allied Artists Producer Walter Wanger Screenplay Daniel Mainwaring from the Collier’s serial and novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney Photography (black and white) Ellsworth Fredericks Music Carmen Dragon Music Editor Jerry Irvin Sound Ralph Butler Sound Editor Del Harris Editor Robert S. Eisen Production Design Edward Haworth Set Decorator Joseph Kish Make-up Emile LaVigne

CAST Kevin McCarthy Dr Miles Bennell Dana Wynter Becky Driscoll King Donovan Jack Belicec Carolyn Jones Teddy Belicec Larry Gates Dr Danny Kaufman Jean Willes Sally Virginia Christine Wilma Ralph Dumke Nick Grivett, police officer Whit Bissell Dr Hill Richard Deacon Dr Harvey Bassett Tom Fadden Uncle Ira Kenneth Patterson Mr Driscoll, Becky’s father Guy Way Sam Janzek, police officer Bobby Clark Jimmy Grimaldi Everett Glass Dr Ed Pursey

Sam Peckinpah Charlie Buckholtz, gas meter reader Dabbs Greer Mac Lomax, gas station attendant Marie Selland Martha Lomax Beatrice Maude Grandma Grimaldi Guy Rennie Proprietor, Sky Terrace Night Club Jean Andren Aunt Aleda Eileen Stevens Mrs Grimaldi Pat O’Malley Baggage handler Released in the US by Allied Artists Pictures Corp. on 5 February 1956. Released in the UK by Associated British Pathé Limited on 1 October 1956, Certificate X, at 7,211 feet (80 minutes 7 seconds). Filmed from 23 March to 27 April 1955 at Los Angeles, Glendale and Sierra Madre, California, USA.

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Select Bibliography Badmington, Neil, ‘Pod Almighty!, or, Humanism, Posthumanism, and the Strange Case of Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, Textual Practice vol. 15 no. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 5–22. Belton, John, ‘Don Siegel’, in Jean-Pierre Coursodon with Pierre Sauvage, American Directors, vol. 2. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), pp. 335–42. Bernstein, Matthew, Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Biskind, Peter, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). Byers, Thomas, ‘Kissing Becky: Masculine Fears and Misogynist Moments in Science Fiction Films’, Arizona Quarterly vol. 45 no. 3 (Autumn 1989), pp. 77–95. Dowdy, Andrew, The Films of the Fifties: The American State of Mind (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1973). Finney, Jack, The Third Level (New York: Rinehart, 1957). Finney, Jack, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (New York: Dell, 1961). Finney, Jack, Time and Again (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). Grant, Barry Keith (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). Hendershot, Cyndy, ‘The Invaded Body: Paranoia and Radiation Anxiety in Invaders from Mars, It Came from Outer Space and Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, Extrapolation vol. 39 no. 1 (Spring 1998), pp. 26–39.

Higashi, Sumiko, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Pods Then and Now’, Jump Cut vol. 24 no. 25 (1981), pp. 3–4. Hoberman, J., ‘Paranoia and the Pods’, Sight and Sound vol. 4 no. 5 (May 1994), pp. 28–31. Johnson, Glen M., ‘“We’d Fight … We Had To”: The Body Snatchers as Novel and Film’, Journal of Popular Culture vol. 13 no. 1 (Summer 1979), pp. 5–16. Johnson, William (ed.), Focus on the Science Fiction Film (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972). Kaminsky, Stuart M., ‘Kaminsky on Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, Cinefantastique vol. 2 no. 3 (Winter 1973), pp. 17–23. Kaminsky, Stuart M., Don Siegel, Director (New York: Curtis Books, 1974). Kaminsky, Stuart M., American Film Genres (Dayton, OH: Pflaum, 1979). Kass, Judith M., ‘Don Siegel’, The Hollywood Professionals, vol. 4. (London and New York: A. S. Barnes, 1975). Laura, Ernesto G., ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, in William Johnson (ed.), Focus on the Science Fiction Film (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), pp. 71–3. LaValley, Al (ed.), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Rutgers Films in Print 14) (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1989). LeGacy, Arthur, ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Metaphor for the Fifties’, Literature/Film Quarterly vol. 6 no. 3 (1978), pp. 285–92. Lovell, Alan, Don Siegel: American Cinema (London: BFI, 1975).

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Mann, Katrina, ‘“You’re Next!”: Postwar Hegemony Besieged in Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, Cinema Journal vol. 44 no. 1 (Fall 2004), pp. 49–68. McCarthy, Kevin and Ed Gorman (eds), ‘They’re Here!’: Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tribute (New York: Berkley, 1999). Outhwaite, Paul, Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Don Siegel (Middlesborough: D. M. Cinema Productions, 2006). Peary, Danny, Cult Movies (New York: Dell, 1981). Samuels, Stuart, ‘The Age of Conspiracy and Conformity: Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, in John O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson (eds), American

History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York: Ungar, 1979), pp. 203–17. Sarris, Andrew, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968). Sobchack, Vivian, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1986). Wood, Robin, ‘Don Siegel’, in Richard Roud (ed.), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, vol. 2, The Major Filmmakers (New York: Viking, 1980), pp. 921–4. Yacowar, Maurice, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Criterion laser disk with audio commentary by Yacowar, 1986.

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