(1956)

Starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter; dir: Don Siegel

In the superb 2000 Czech film Divided We Fall, centering on ordinary day-to-day life as distorted by the occupying Nazis’ banal evil, there’s a brief scene of droll humour which serves to contrast its harrowing tone. The naïve character is being instructed by the character in-the-know on how to disport themselves outside their house in public view, when openly observable by collaborators and Nazis alike: ‘Don’t show any emotion, look impassive - don't show any interest in what’s going on around you’. When the identical scene (no doubt coincidental) appears in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it underscores the chilling context the creators of this 1956 film were working with.

That Eisenhower small-town dwellers can be a paradigm for Nazis attests to the powers of filmmaker Don Siegel’s allusive suggestions. Whether the ‘pods’, as this film characterises society’s drones, represent political left or right, remains open to conjecture. Siegel lamented at the time that "so many people have no feeling about culture, no pain or sorrow", and it is more this characteristic of cheek-turning and a sheep-like herd mentality that he is taking aim at here. It gives the film a universality that has ensured its longevity nearly a half century on.

OK, sympathy for the devil (and Bonnie and Clyde) apart, what do we have here? At the time, though discredited, McCarthyism cast an embarrassing shadow and it is a zeitgeist of conformism and corporatism that Invasion clearly rails against. That such characteristics could equally be found amongst Red-baiters and Commie sympathisers makes Siegel’s metaphorical ‘alien influence’ theme harmonise with a timeless Americanism, a characteristic that would resurface in a different crisis with his biggest hit, 1971’s Dirty Harry.

A film with a greater sense of dream-logic than most, Invasion resonates with its noir forbears in that internal states are its primary focus; it makes its projections of guilt and paranoia highly generalised to embrace Everyman (and Everywoman). As Peter Biskind says (in Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us To Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties), "normality itself becomes sinister"; several commentators describe it as the most paranoid film ever made.

But in 1956 they hadn’t seen anything yet. The social upheaval of the 60s was coming, but you can already see the seeds here in Body Snatchers’ extraordinary theme of a ‘fear of sleep’, ie fear of the id. As with 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, with which this film spans the final half decade of Eisenhower/Nixon, an unambiguous fear of dream states reveals the final, unstoppable stages of America’s hidden drives percolating to the surface. Is it any wonder that The Beatles, waiting just around the corner with their orgasmic vocal arrangements, would blow the lid off the nation’s repressed unconscious?

What’s interesting is seeing where Siegel’s iconoclasm fits in. Clearly siding with the outsiders rather than the pod mainstream, he nevertheless evinces a nearly hysterical fear of slipping into unconsciousness. Today these limits of his liberal impulses give Invasion an odd tension. His working title was Sleep No More, which is said to have Shakespearean overtones; Perchance to dream?  This fear of descending into sleep is reflected in the placement of pods in ‘underground’ locations – the cellar, buried on the floor of the greenhouse – and later as Miles and Becky hide out, not just in a cave, but under its floor. And the pods themselves are a wonderful metaphor for the spread of suburbia, Pleasant Valley Sunday style: soulless on the inside, but OK on the outside.

In Body Snatchers the encroaching dehumanisation of McWorld is deftly sketched in: the roadhouse (where Becky and Miles repair for martinis) has replaced its band with a jukebox; the once-proud roadside fruit stall is in decay; fingerprints are absent from pods, underlining their lack of individuality.

Even though the studio (run by pods, according to Siegel) tried to mitigate its alienating message by tacking on a framing prologue and epilogue, such devices fail to diminish the enduring impact of what many – rightly – see as the greatest of the 50s sci-fi/alien invasion cycle. And, as with many of the better, sharper works of art, Invasion of the Body Snatchers today seems to reveal even more than it originally intended.

- Roger Westcombe

 Divided We Fall