Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

(On Cable TV, July 2019) The premise of Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been made and remade so often (often with the serial numbers filed off, meaning that the 1956 film’s three official remakes only hint at a much wider legacy) that I expected a return to the original to be, well, a bit dull. Hadn’t I seen all of this in 1978, 1993 or 2007? But as this predecessor played, I found myself gradually taken with the sure-footed execution of director Don Siegel and even more so by its atmosphere. Setting a story of viral conformity in a small town of the mid-1950s now feels like the best of all possible choices despite how on-the-nose it feels—a then-contemporary setting now accumulates a great deal of subsequent respectability: one imagines that if nothing of the sort had been made, a later filmmaker would have done it. The execution also dovetails into the growing nightmare of realizing that your friend and neighbours are being replaced by alien doubles—as the film advances, the period black-and-white cinematography (widescreen!) becomes harsher as the night falls—while one can remain unconvinced by the framing the device, the voiceover narration and the high-contrast cinematography combine to evoke a delicious sense of late-period noir science fiction that definitely underscores the film’s origins. And there’s the thick political allegory of the story, which (fascinatingly enough) can be read as either anti-Communist, anti-McCarthyism, or both, or neither. In more timeless matters, the performances of Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter are essential to the film—their characters’ obvious love for each other tightens the screws of the conclusion (the real conclusion, not the tacked-on happy epilogue) and makes the film much stronger as well. It’s not only that Invasion of the Body Snatchers has aged well—it’s that, from the get-go, it nailed down the essentials of the story in such a way that its predecessors could not improve upon.