310. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Directed By Don Siegel
Synopsis
Pea Pods from SPACE replace the people of Santa Mira with exact replicas. Except for one man! Like Cocoon but evil!
Review
B-movies, particularly during the heyday of the Production Code could be some of the most interesting, original and deep films coming out of Hollywood. Such is the case with this film, often interpreted as a pro-McCarthy or anti-McCarthy film, it is in the end a great Sci-Fi film.
The fact that the political undertones of the film are so open to interpretation is a big part of its beauty, it is completely dependent on your perspective. The film makers claim that they had no political message, and this is perhaps true, but the political conditions of the time certainly influenced its feeling of paranoia and suspicion.
The acting isn't really stellar, there is a little tacked-on ending to the film, but all these are perfectly excusable for the type of production it is. The sense of paranoia and claustrophobia is, however, very effective throughout. The special effects are perfectly adequate as the idea of body snatching precludes the need for complex make-up or "monster suits". So a fun watch.
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film has been read as both an allegory for the perceived loss of personal autonomy in the Soviet Union and as an indictment of McCarthyist paranoia about Communism during the early stages of the Cold War. as Adam Roberts wrote in Science Fiction; The New Critical Idiom:
Indeed [the film] can be read both as right-wing McCarthyite scaremongering—Communists from an Alien place are infiltrating our American towns and wiping out their American values, and the worst of it is they look exactly like Americans—and as left-wing liberal satire on the ideological climate of conformism that McCarthyism produced, where the lack of emotion of the podpeople corresponds to the ethical blind eyes turned by Americans to the persecutions of their fellows by over-zealous McCarthyites.
Despite the general agreement among film critics regarding these political connotations of the film, lead actor Kevin McCarthy said in an interview included on the 1998 DVD release that he felt no political allegory was intended. The interviewer stated that he had spoken with the author of the original novel, Jack Finney, who also professed to have intended no specific political allegory in the work.
In his autobiography, "I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History", Walter Mirisch writes: "People began to read meanings into pictures that were never intended. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an example of that. I remember reading a magazine article arguing that the picture was intended as an allegory about the communist infiltration of America. From personal knowledge, neither Walter Wanger nor Don Siegel, who directed it, nor Dan Mainwaring, who wrote the script nor the original author Jack Finney, nor myself saw it as anything other than a thriller, pure and simple".
Whole thing on Youtube, here's part 1:
Synopsis
Pea Pods from SPACE replace the people of Santa Mira with exact replicas. Except for one man! Like Cocoon but evil!
Review
B-movies, particularly during the heyday of the Production Code could be some of the most interesting, original and deep films coming out of Hollywood. Such is the case with this film, often interpreted as a pro-McCarthy or anti-McCarthy film, it is in the end a great Sci-Fi film.
The fact that the political undertones of the film are so open to interpretation is a big part of its beauty, it is completely dependent on your perspective. The film makers claim that they had no political message, and this is perhaps true, but the political conditions of the time certainly influenced its feeling of paranoia and suspicion.
The acting isn't really stellar, there is a little tacked-on ending to the film, but all these are perfectly excusable for the type of production it is. The sense of paranoia and claustrophobia is, however, very effective throughout. The special effects are perfectly adequate as the idea of body snatching precludes the need for complex make-up or "monster suits". So a fun watch.
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film has been read as both an allegory for the perceived loss of personal autonomy in the Soviet Union and as an indictment of McCarthyist paranoia about Communism during the early stages of the Cold War. as Adam Roberts wrote in Science Fiction; The New Critical Idiom:
Indeed [the film] can be read both as right-wing McCarthyite scaremongering—Communists from an Alien place are infiltrating our American towns and wiping out their American values, and the worst of it is they look exactly like Americans—and as left-wing liberal satire on the ideological climate of conformism that McCarthyism produced, where the lack of emotion of the podpeople corresponds to the ethical blind eyes turned by Americans to the persecutions of their fellows by over-zealous McCarthyites.
Despite the general agreement among film critics regarding these political connotations of the film, lead actor Kevin McCarthy said in an interview included on the 1998 DVD release that he felt no political allegory was intended. The interviewer stated that he had spoken with the author of the original novel, Jack Finney, who also professed to have intended no specific political allegory in the work.
In his autobiography, "I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History", Walter Mirisch writes: "People began to read meanings into pictures that were never intended. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an example of that. I remember reading a magazine article arguing that the picture was intended as an allegory about the communist infiltration of America. From personal knowledge, neither Walter Wanger nor Don Siegel, who directed it, nor Dan Mainwaring, who wrote the script nor the original author Jack Finney, nor myself saw it as anything other than a thriller, pure and simple".
Whole thing on Youtube, here's part 1:
posted by Francisco Silva @ 12:56 AM
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