Invasion of the Body Snatchers
It’s kind of shocking we haven’t had a recent adaptation of Jack Finney’s classic story of a town overrun by aliens taking on the lives of its citizens. The last adaptation for film was 2007, but given the proliferation of political radicalization since, you’d think someone else would take a swing at it. Or, maybe newer filmmakers are smart enough to know they will not really be able to top what Don Siegel did in 1956, and what Philip Kaufman did in 1978. After all, images from those films have stayed powerful and relevant all these years.
I knew if I was going to finally watch Kaufman’s post-Watergate thriller, I had to watch Siegel’s ‘56 film first. It’s interesting to see the ways both films go about their business given the challenges of their eras. Siegel’s film had to contend with the Hayes Code and getting a low budget. Kaufman had more leniency- in the ‘70s, studios were willing to take bigger swings, and he was able to cast deep in the character lineup with well-known stars and budding character actors. That doesn’t mean that, in a post-“Exorcist” and “Omen” era of horror, and a post-“Star Wars” era of science fiction, the approach Kaufman and screenwriter W.D. Richter had to the material wasn’t challenging.
Donald Sutherland plays Matthew Bennell, a health inspector in San Francisco who’s tasked with finding violations in the health code, often in restaurants. As the film progresses, his focus finds itself drawn to these unusual pods spread around the city. His colleague, Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), finds herself immersed in this on a personal level when something seems off with her husband. Within the pods grow alien duplicates of people. On the outside, they look the same, but they are devoid of humanity, and empathy. We come to know several other people in their proximity, namely a husband and wife (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) who own a local spa, and a prominent psychologist (Leonard Nimoy), but as the film progresses, we see how Matthew and Elizabeth find themselves trapped around them, even by their own friends.
There’s much more of an air of mystery surrounding the events in Siegel’s film than there is in Kaufman’s; early on, the images through Michael Chapman’s cinematography, and the sounds on the soundtrack from jazz composer Denny Zeitlin (his only score for film, and it’s a banger), set the stage, as we see (in color) distinctive looks at vegetation and plants around San Francisco, a harbinger of things to come. What do I mean when I refer to this film being a challenge for horror post “Exorcist” and “The Omen?” Quite simply, those films deal with clear-cut villainy through a good vs. evil lens; however great they are (and they are great), the tension is very straightforward. In “Body Snatchers,” the evil could be a friend, or a loved one, or yourself; all you have to do is fall asleep, and you get duplicated. When it comes to its place in science fiction, at the time, it certainly has more in common with the sci-fi of the ’70s than it doesn’t, but- by coming out a year after “Star Wars” (and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” coming out the year after Kaufman’s film)- it feels out of step with the trend of the genre at the time, although in its wake we did get “Alien” and, in the early ’80s, John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” It’s fascinating to see how this movie fits in different genre paradigms at the time it was made.
This also does fit into the political spectrum of cinema at the time. Post-Watergate, society was rightly cynical of our government, and one of the interesting things about Kaufman’s film is how it leans into how unlikable bureaucrats are early on with Matthew before it has to swing him in the opposite direction when he and Elizabeth become among the last ones not turned. Societal structures fail due to mass indoctrination. The final moments are chilling as we know what has happened to Matthew without having seen it, and are just waiting for the film to reveal it. It does so in one of the most chilling finales of modern cinema. Kaufman understood the bleak nature of this story, because he understood how bleak the country still was, even as a galaxy far, far away was starting to give us easy bad guys to root against again.
