Don Siegel and producer Walter Wanger were quick off the mark in adapting Jack Finney’s 1955 novel. They shot the film in under a month and for less than $400,000. It was intended as a B thriller, no more, no less: the many layers of political allegory which generations of viewers have since disinterred were quite some way from the makers’ thoughts.
Of course, it’s the very open-endedness of the film’s subtext that gives it power. When a sleepy California town is overrun, first by the outbreak of a strange delusion that people have been replaced by doppelgangers, but then gradually by the doppelgangers themselves, the film is brilliantly placed, however unwittingly, to illustrate America’s political paranoia from both ends.The creeping dread of communism in ordinary homes can be read as an anxiety the script goes on to justify, from one point of view, and the finger-pointing suspicions of the townsfolk feel like a witch-hunt, of sorts. But the much graver threat is one of the tables being turned, normality outnumbered, the finger pointing back. By the end, one McCarthy (Kevin, the lead actor) feels very much like the victim of his namesake, Senator Joe – a man blacklisted by a hyper-conformist totalitarian society and sent into panicked exile.
Siegel is never guilty of overthinking all this. He builds the film with eerie simplicity and calm. He and the photographer, Ellsworth Fredericks, knew that the best way to frame hysteria was to make its surroundings, and even the camera movements, as placid and uninflected as possible. The actors go crazy while the film retains its dry, clinical sanity to the last. The pod people, unstoppable in their spread, say they have no need for love or emotion. While they’re at it, they could iron out some other perplexing and erratic human behaviours, like Dana Wynter’s inexplicable penchant for a two-minute boiled egg.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) re-release. Dir: Don Siegel. Starring: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones, Virginia Christine. PG cert, 80 min.
