Movie Review: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

6/10

Howdy, y'all.

Remember my review of The Day the Earth Stood Still? I'm gonna quote from it in a really self obsessed way:

The cold war angle is much more sensitively handled (in this film) than in the vast majority of "sci fi as red paranoia" films of this era

And rather than get a good example of the other side of the coin, the very next sci-fi film from this era we watch is actually an anti-McCarthy movie rather than the "reds under the bed" story it superficially resembles. I hope to see a real "communists as aliens" movie so I can show you what I meant soon, sorry about that.

Now, this version we saw was the original. Not the Donald Sutherland, no.

And not the Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman one. What do you mean you've never heard of that version? It came out this year. After being on the shelf for a year and a half. It got reedited about fifty times. Then they reshot bits because it made no sense. Can you tell it sucks yet?

Anyway, as in the remakes there's a small US town which is seeing changes in people's personalities caused (not to our knowledge until later) by weird seed pods from outerspace which copy you and, in the manner of Windows Media ripping your CDs, get the superficial details right but lose something in the transfer. The resulting facsimiles are no longer human.

The "pod people" are emotionless, loveless and content through ignorance of discontent - this being a fairly searing commentary on what the Cold War and red fear was doing to America at the time the film was made. People's humanity was getting sucked out by fear and hate, and the seeming inevitability of a bad outcome to the conflict between the USA and USSR. This is the movies moral, in the fight against communism (or other evil) it is important to remain true to who you are and to retain your humanity in the face of adversity.

Hey, it's still a hokey concept, and the remake with Donald Sutherland is considerably more successful at capturing a certain malaise after the love era of the late 60s than this is at picturing McCarthyist era America, but still worth a watch in any circumstance.

It is hard in these days of naturalistic acting and realism to judge a movie fairly, contending with a hard boiled voice over narration and square jawed leading man Kevin McCarthy being hyper serious in that "Honest Joe" character that sci fi always kicks out. Sarah Palin would love this guy.

The acting is all fine for the time, though the differentiation between them acting woodenly as humans and then acting slightly more woodenly as pod people is sometimes hard to be certain of.

The film makes a hideous plotholetastic (a new word!) error late on, when a major character's transformation does not follow the film's internal logic (no pod is nearby and the character's original body is not destroyed) and its a shame that the original ending (as bleak as the 70s version's) was compromised and a more optimistic (though not conclusively so) prologue and epilogue were added, but they did things differently back then.

You can always go back to The Third Man if it's moral ambiguity you want.

So overall it's an inoffensive and pretty good 50s sci fi movie with a well thought out and ingenious premise. I recommend the 70s version over this one any day but there's no reason to avoid this one like the plague. Decent showing.

A