Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Director:

Don Siegel

Writers:

Daniel Mainwaring (screenplay)
Jack Finney (Collier's magazine serial)

Release Date:

5 February 1956 (USA)

Genre:

Horror | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline:

... there was nothing to hold onto - except each other.

Plot:

A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.

Plot Keywords:

Psychiatrist | Delusion | Doctor | Uncharacteristic Behavior | Fingerprints

Awards:

1 win

Cast

  (Cast overview, first billed only)

Kevin McCarthy	...	Dr. Miles J. Bennell
Dana Wynter	...	Becky Driscoll
Larry Gates	...	Dr. Dan 'Danny' Kauffman
King Donovan	...	Jack Belicec
Carolyn Jones	...	Theodora 'Teddy' Belicec
Jean Willes	...	Nurse Sally Withers
Ralph Dumke	...	Police Chief Nick Grivett
Virginia Christine	...	Wilma Lentz
Tom Fadden	...	Uncle Ira Lentz
Kenneth Patterson	...	Stanley Driscoll
Guy Way	...	Officer Sam Janzek
Eileen Stevens	...	Anne Grimaldi
Beatrice Maude	...	Grandma Driscoll
Jean Andren	...	Eleda Lentz
Bobby Clark	...	Jimmy Grimaldi

Also Known As:

Sleep No More
They Came from Another World (USA) (working title)
Walter Wanger's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (USA) (complete title)

Runtime:

80 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

2.00 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Perspecta Sound encoding) (Western Electric Recording)

Certification:

Finland:K-12 | West Germany:16 | Australia:PG | Sweden:15 | UK:PG | USA:Approved (certificate #17567)

Filming Locations:

1200 N. Virgil Avenue, Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

Walter Wanger Productions

Trivia:

Ranked #9 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre "Sci-Fi" in June 2008.

Goofs:

Continuity: As the posse runs through Bronson Cave, after the policeman stops on the planks, says his lines, and then runs ahead, look closely for the man in the white shirt: it looks like he fell down onto the planks before the shot ended.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Dr. Harvey Bassett: Oh, Doctor Hill.
Dr. Hill: Dr. Basset. Well, where's the patient?
Dr. Harvey Bassett: I hated to drag you out of bed at this time of night. You'll soon see why I did.

Movie Connections:

Featured in Jack the Bear (1993)

Siegel's classic paranoia flick still gives me the creeps.

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is most famous as a thinly veiled Communist allegory, with its emotionless pod people, 'a malignant disease, slowly taking over the country', as leading man Kevin McCarthy (whose surname just can't be coincidental) puts it. And, thanks to Siegel's craft, it is an effective thriller. One can't help but be effected by McCarthy's desperate attempts to alert his fellow Americans to the threat, before it's too late.

The film is presented to us as a flashback, with McCarthy explaining the take-over of his town to the extremely sceptical authorities. This is a brilliant device as, unlike with most flashback narratives (especially those in film noir), we don't know how the film will resolve itself. Whereas noir flashbacks begin at the end of the story in order to create a sense of foreboding, Bodysnatchers reverses this, creating an uncertainty that contributes to the central theme of paranoia.

The film is beautifully photographed in crisp, 1950s monochrome. There is an interesting contrast between this photorealism, and the more artificial aspects of the cinematography – dark shadows cast across faces etc – which is suggestive of the duality of the inhabitants of the small Californian town. My favourite scene is McCarthy's striking address to camera in the final act, which must be one of the earliest examples of breaking the fourth wall in film (in Hollywood at least, if not cinema in general), and is one of the most memorable images in screen history.

While the running time doesn't allow for much character development, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is a thrilling film, turning human beings into cold, unfeeling monsters. Whether you agree with its politics or not won't have any effect on your enjoyment of this science fiction classic.