[Part of the Science Fiction special in the Vienna Filmmuseum.]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is Don Siegel‘s adaptation of Jack Finney‘s book The Body Snatchers, starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones.

Plot:
Dr Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns early from a business trip because he got the message that a lot of people in his small town wanted to see him, and only him. But when he arrives home, everything seems to be fine. Except for the few people who claim that the people they love are not their usual selves, even though they look and act just the same. Bennell is intrigued and togethe with his old flame Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), he decides to investigate. Soon, they make a pretty gruesome discovery.

I can imagine that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was very scary at the time. But the scariness hasn’t aged very well and seeing it today, it’s mostly ridiculous. Deliciously so, no doubt, but still. That said, it’s an immensly entertaining and well-made movie.

[SPOILERS]

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the underlying allegory of this movie (McCarthyism etc etc, intended or not). It’s well made and it’s interesting. And the whole part with not being able to go to sleep anymore is scary. But a movie that includes lines like:

I never knew fear until I kissed Becky.

You can’t really take that completely seriously, can you?

In any case, I think that the horror of not being able to sleep anymore was a little lost, especially because I kept wondering how the whole thing with the pods worked. They grow a second body – but what happens to yours? But then, when Becky falls asleep after all, it’s her body that’s suddenly alien – so what happened to the grown body from the pod? Or do they just melt together? Then how come the distance between you and your assigned pod doesn’t matter? Or if it does matter, why wouldn’t Becky and Miles be able to sleep in the cave – since they were far away from pods at the time? Anyway, these questions kept bugging me and might have made me to preoccupied to be scared.

But I very much liked the relationship between Becky and Miles. You really got the feeling that they just picked up where they left off ten or fifteen years earlier, they have that familiarity about them. It was quite astonishing, too, that both of them were divorcees – I thought that was rather forward for the time.

The dialogues seemed a little overblown, which might be more a sign of the times than the quality of the writing. But the cast was good enough to work it, especially Carolyn Jones. And the score – by the wonderfully named Carmen Dragon – was really good, too.

Summarising: More amusing than scary but well worth a watch.