What is cooler: Spending a movie weekend watching three versions of the cultural Rorschach test “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”?
Or getting a chance to listen to David Grinspoon, a well-regarded astrobiologist, following tonight’s 7:30 screening of a plush new print of Don Siegel’s 1956 black-and-white classic?
Grinspoon’s “Lonely Planets: The Natural Life of Alien Life” entertains the possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy. The book won the Pen Center Literary Award in 2004. But there’s little optimism or yearning for close encounters in the meeting of human and extraterrestrial envisioned by directors Siegel, Philip Kaufman (1978) or Abel Ferrara, whose 1993 horror flick was simply called “Body Snatchers.”
All three films put the “alien” in alienation, projecting disaster on the veggielike pods that arrive to grab not just our flesh and bones, but extinguish our souls, our ability to love, our personalities.
In Siegel’s showpiece, Kevin McCarthy makes a hysterical (in both senses of the word) entrance as Dr. Miles Bennell. The deranged doc has just escaped from a small California town whose residents aren’t who they appear to be.
Much of the movie unfolds in flashback as Bennell takes a concerned physician at a mental institution through his initial skepticism. At first, he, too, didn’t believe his patients’ fears that their loved ones were not their loved ones. But soon, he, love interest Becky Driscoll and their friends are plunged into the terrifying realization that pods are replicating and replacing their friends and neighbors.
Bennell tries to convince his listener of his sanity while warning him of the alien incursion. Will he succeed?
Made in the 1950s, Siegel’s film has been read as both a parable about the soul-killing dangers of communism and a riff on the pitfalls of McCarthyism.
In playing the three films concurrently, the Denver Film Society is heartily embracing its role as the city’s incubator of cinema ideas. That may sound heavy, a “good for you” virtue. But the “Body Snatchers” series – as well the upcoming month-
long David Lynch appreciation, “Naked Lynch” – turn out to be smart fun.
Typically, pooh-poohing remakes makes critical sense. But watching these “Body Snatchers,” shot over five decades, puts one in the mind of jazz covers. Consider “Invasions” an American standard in paranoia. Let’s all hum along.
Dr. Bennell’s portrayer, McCarthy, makes a pivotal cameo in Philip Kaufman’s “Invasion.” Just as unhinged, just as desperate, he throws himself across the windshield of the movie’s protagonists.
“Help! Help! They’re coming,” he cries. “They’re coming. Listen!” Donald Sutherland’s and Brooke Adams’ characters lock the car doors.
The Cold War gave Siegel’s movie its feverish pitch. Kaufman and writer W.D. Richter tap what the late social critic Christopher Lasch called “the culture of narcissism” to give this version its queasy angst.
In their version, Elizabeth (Adams) confronts Dr. David Kibner. Why is he ignoring a woman’s claims that her husband is not her husband? After all, Elizabeth’s own hubby is not himself.
Leonard Nimoy’s psychiatrist answers her fears with a weird diatribe about marriage. “People step in and out of relationships because they don’t want responsibility,” he says. “That’s why marriages are going to hell. The family unit is shot to hell.”
Ferrara’s lesser take is simply called “Body Snatchers” and moves the action to a Southern military base. But even this version, which resembles a Xerox copy when the toner’s running low, illuminates some cultural anxieties. Naming the local watering hole the Top Gun suggests that the guiding fear of the movie might be an indie director’s in relation to Hollywood pod people.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers”
UNRATED 1 hour, 20 minutes|SCI-FI |Directed by Don Siegel; written by Daniel Mainwaring, based on Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers”; photography by Ellsworth Fredericks; starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, Carolyn Jones, King Donovan |Opens today at Starz FilmCenter for one week with special weekend screenings of Philip Kaufman’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978) and Abel Ferrara’s “Body Snatchers” (1993); information: 303-820-FILM or denverfilm.org
