I'm not a pod: 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Often remade, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an easily retooled parable only due to its original release: it is so ambiguous that to date, different reviews insist upon its absolute meaning in various dimensions of conflict: from communism to McCarthyism to even the simple psychological conflict of the parable itself, the film resists to make its stand in any particular direction; but how did it become such a vague and contested text? How was Invasion of the Body Snatchers produced in such a way so as to become a contrastingly-read text? In this essay, it will be argued that ambiguity at all levels of the film’s production contributed to its dilution as social commentary.
Introduction
Through an elucidation of Monogram’s history and imperatives as a studio as it transitioned to become Allied Artists, an A-studio; the adaptation from novel to film; the meanings of the film to Walter Wanger, Don Siegel, Daniel Mainwaring, and Kevin McCarthy; Walter Wanger’s proposed marketing for the film; the film’s initial reception in its private test screenings; and finally, the addition of the framing narrative by Allied Artists, it will become clear that Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a text was fighting a war all its own on its journey to spread its message to the cultural lexicon.
If contemporary film reviews are any indication, the legacy of Invasion of the Body Snatchers lies both in its comparison to its many remakes and in the opaque ambiguity of its message. While most mentions of the film only posit it as a baseline for its successors, they also make reference to its indecipherable, yet somehow absolute allegory.
Roger Ebert, writing of The Invasion, the fourth and latest remake by Oliver Hirschbiegel in 2007, lists off the various re-appropriations of the parable, film by film, stating the original “was widely decoded as an attack on McCarthyism.”Ebert, Roger. Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2010. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2009. Print. Ebert’s strangely strict declaration of the supposed historical record is matched by Don Druker of the Chicago Reader, who, writing in 1985, said the film “says a great deal more about the McCarthyist hysteria of the early 50s than about the danger of invasion from outer space by soul-stealing ‘pods’.”Druker, Don. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Chicago Reader. 25 Apr 1985. Web. 16 Mar 2016. Druker allows an ambiguity to his reading of the film, however — in his description the film could be parsed as being for or against communism.
This ambiguity comes to the forefront in future reviews; The Guardian released a plethora of reviews in the wake of the film’s 2014 rerelease, and its various reviewers were unanimously baffled by the film, treating the film as if it were strongly stating a concrete message, yet the message itself was muddled in the transmission. Peter Bradshaw asks, “Does it show the virus of communism […] or the virus of anti-communist complacency and conformity?”Bradshaw, Peter. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The Guardian. 30 Oct 2014. Web. 16 Mar 2016. John Patterson simply noted that “the debate still rages as to whether the movie is an indictment of a creeping proto-communist mentality in America,”Patterson, John. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The Guardian. 27 Oct 2014. Web. 16 Mar 2016. and Jonathan Romney admitted that it was “open to varied political readings […] its enduring resonance lies in its fable-like simplicity.”Romney, Jonathan. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers review — taut direction, an authoritative lead and a magnificently ambivalent ending.” The Guardian. 2 Nov 2014. Web. 16 Mar 2016. While Tim Robey wrote that “by the end, one McCarthy […] feels very much like the victim of his namesake, Senator Joe,”Robey, Tim. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), review.” The Telegraph. 30 Oct 2014. Web. 16 Mar 2016. strangely suggesting that the surname similarity of the protagonist to the subject matter of his decoding of the film was somehow planned, Keith Phipps succinctly states that “If Invasion were one or the other, or if it were only a reflection of that chapter in American political history, it would be half the movie it is. The film’s opacity helps make it resonant.”Phipps, Keith. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Blu-Ray).” The A.V. Club. 25 Jul 2012. Web. 16 Mar 2016.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is what I describe as a “prismic text” — it can refract whatever allegory suits the present purpose due to the framework of its paranoia being too vague to be applicable to a certain scenario or context. That any and every reviewer attributes it to the hysteria of the blacklist is a reductive assessment of its historical context; and its fate to being degradingly remade every generation a result of the human desire to replace the allegory in relatable contexts. What is most curious, however, is the process upon which the original film was made as ambiguous as it is — the various changes in structure at various levels of the film’s production that shaped the film toward being a contested text, able to be contrastingly read. This investigation, following the film’s genesis, begins at the studio level, with the birth of Monogram, and its successor, Allied Artists.
Monogram and Allied Artists
The history of Monogram Pictures is traced briefly, yet thoroughly, by Kyle Dawson Edwards in “‘Monogram Means Business’: B-film Marketing and Series Filmmaking at Monogram Pictures,” and while the full history is traced in his piece, only several moments and features concerning Monogram are pertinent to its influence on the film.
Founded by W. Ray Johnston in 1931,Edwards, Kyle Dawson. “‘Monogram Means Business’: B-film Marketing and Series Filmmaking at Monogram Pictures.” Film History 23.4 (2011): 386-400. Print. Monogram employed “a strategy that identified and made us of those limited, underserved, or marginalized niches in the film industry for steady, albeit modest, profits.” In addition to this strategy was the influence of Steve Broidy, who joined the board of directors in the late 1930s, who employed a “marketing and sales approach that focused upon Monogram’s core competencies in the current B-film market and increased attention to exhibitors.” Broidy wished to emphasize the company over the products — leading its exhibitors, who were their intended targets, to “associate each of its film releases with a set of similar values and meanings.”
This is a reversal of the classical star system. Monogram wished not to make their values corporeal with a set of consistent stars, but rely upon consistent scenarios throughout the film catalogue to sell only the Monogram name itself. Edwards makes mention of the ad copy Monogram would provide that “guarantee […] the “respect” and “security” Monogram can offer to exhibitors. Again and again, attention is called to the “stability” of the company and its product supply.” Monogram’s success started to halt with the decline of the traditional double feature format in the late 1940s, and Broidy in response created an A-level production label: Allied Artists. The negotiation between the two studios in the public eye is described by Edwards:
Ibid.
In an effort to disassociate the brand identity of Monogram and its products, Allied engaged in an intense product positioning effort as it began to develop product-focused publicity campaigns (as opposed to its previous market-focused approach) around specific film releases and creative talent associated with the company. In the early 1950s, Allied trumpeted its increased production budgets and film quality, announced a three-year, nine-picture production deal with Walter Wanger and promised to expand the use of Technicolor in its films.
While Allied does begin to shift its focus to the strengths of each individual film release, what is most pertinent about Allied’s shift in strategy is its inability to cease focusing on its strength as a company; much like the films themselves, major studios developed identities in a self-effacing way. Allied, as a successor to Monogram, inherited its pride in reliability to the exhibitor, and still cultivated the stigma of B-film production in news coverage, descriptions by the production crew of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and by Wanger himself, who was producer over Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as will be described later.
The first layer of ambiguity in the development of Invasion is that Allied Artists was never quite wholly an A or a B studio in reputation nor practice, and as Edwards asserts, “vestiges of the old Monogram corporate strategy remained […] it adopted similar sales and marketing policies in a dogged quest to nurture relationships with film exhibitors.”
The original novel
The original story of Invasion of the Body Snatchers — written by Jack Finney, first as a serial and later compiled as a novel — would have both rejected classical narration in a direct adaptation and strictly upheld science fiction and horror generic convention. Miles begins his story by warning the reader that “it will not be neatly tied up at the end […] Not by me it won’t, anyway.”Finney, Jack. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. New York: Scribner, 1998. Print. Finney’s original novel also includes minor changes in cast, including an Aunt Aleda, who is also snatched with Uncle Ira, and the second suspected body snatching case not being reported by a little boy, but another woman.
Miles and Becky have a firmly solidified marriage arc, as she consistently makes reference to how good she feels around Miles, safer than usual, or how right it is to be at his side, and Miles eventually confesses he “wish we’d been married, Becky. I wish we were married now,” to which Becky agrees. This arc is completed with Miles and Becky’s marriage in the epilogue.
Finney is careful to ground his story in reality, as Miles amusingly admits “this isn’t a movie, and I’m not a movie hero […] I couldn’t possibly handle four men, or maybe even one”; Miles and Becky are constantly aware of the global importance of their survival, noting “the feeling the world better hope we handle this right,” and Miles even calls his old friend Ben at the Pentagon, working as a lieutenant-colonel, for assistance, before calling the FBI and being cut off by a pod operator.
Becky and Miles also begin to associate the pods with a kind of death of one’s hometown, as Miles muses, returning to Mill Valley after running away, about “how many people still live in the town they were born in […] it’s inexpressibly bad to see that place die.” Becky, observing the street after the pods have infested the area, asks, “Am I imagining it or does this street look — dead?”
Most importantly, Finney never lets paranoia consume the narrative. Miles states that “the fear was there still, active and real, but I was able to think without panic […] we’d had our running away […] but we belonged at home, not in some vague, unknown, mythical new place.”
Finney explains in far greater detail the body snatching process throughout the novel. When finding the first body in development, Jack discusses the process of making a medallion as an allegory:
Ibid.
First, they take a die and make impression number one, giving the blank medal its first rough shape. Then they stamp it with die number two, and it’s the second die that gives you more details: the fine lines and delicate modeling you see in a really good medallion. They have to do it that way because that second die, the one with the details, couldn’t force its way onto smooth medal. You have to give it that first rough shape with die number one.
After finding an article in the newspaper about the discovery of “mysterious objects […] described at large seed pods,” Miles, Becky, Jack, and Theodora also take care to visit a professor of botany, Professor Budlong, who had investigated a pod found in a wheat field. Budlong says it was “Some sort of seed pod […] though I admitted that the substance they were filled with did not resemble what we ordinarily think of as seeds.” While Miles and Becky are trapped in Miles’ office later in the novel, the pods take turns describing their motive and process as well.
The pods’ strength is in “universal adaptability to any and all other life forms, under any and all conditions they might possibly consider,” but “the duplication isn’t perfect. And can’t be. It’s the artificial compounds nuclear physicists are fooling with: unstable, unable to hold their form. We can’t live, Miles. The last of us will be dead […] in five years at the most.”
So what defeats the pods at last? How does one defeat universal adaptability? After days of hiding in a wheat field, Miles and Becky observe that the pods simply leave the planet, finding it “inhospitable.” Miles assumes that “there’d been others […] who’d done what we had — who had simply refused to give up,” and the indomitable nature of the human spirit and its faith in the Capgras delusion was simply too hostile for proper assimilation.
Novel vs. Film
The film itself, based upon Finney’s material, deviates in rather drastic ways. Gone is the mentions of universal adaptability and any attempt to explain the science fiction phenomena present; gone, too, is the inhospitable environment of Earth. Miles in turn does become a movie hero, and in several sequences takes on up to four men in order to escape — escape being the sole narrative priority. While the novel is told past the point of revelation, by a safer, yet confused Miles, the film begins in medias res, with a particularly suspenseful score by Carmen Dragon over the credits: a stirring orchestra being shocked by a sudden burst of noise.Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Prod. Walter Wanger. Republic Pictures, 1998. DVD.
The type strongly emphasises the production of Walter Wanger Pictures and the direction of Don Siegel, as well as the film’s use of SuperScope, a post-production widescreen process that cheaply produced widescreen films by widely cropping the full 35mm frame’s centre, resulting in grainy footage. The emphasis in the credits are likely the result of Allied Artists intervention; by using Wanger’s name as credibility, Siegel’s direction while downplaying Allied Artists involvement, and finally, the technological innovation of SuperScope, the credits are eager to lend the film an inherent reputation to viewers: the performance of quality, the excellence in production, while simultaneously demonstrating to exhibitors that these signifiers of quality were emblematic of the Allied Artists catalogue.
Police cars arrive at a hospital, escorting a mental hospital investigator to meet with Dr. Miles Bennell, who is introduced with a sudden attack on the doctor entering the room — punctuated with orchestra flourish. Framed in the direct centre — the doorway forming a natural frame — he demands not only the doctor, but us, to “tell these fools I’m not crazy! Make them listen to me before it’s too late!” The investigator calmly says he will listen to Miles — and of course, so do we.
The framing device, while defusing the immediate thrill of the plot, also serves to align the viewer with the medical establishment as a jury to win over. While the threat is not made direct, personal, ‘real,’ it is made to be persuasively believed, instead; and while it does not induce the gimmick of panic in the viewer, it also would take easily to cultural adoption through its first question: ‘do you believe?’
The medical establishment, unfortunately, does not by the end of the film; it is only by sheer coincidence that they hear an account of pods after the story is told, and the rest of the country is called to act against the menace — however, the only conclusion to the narrative is that Miles is believed.
The narrative is complete with his story being accepted, and Miles, escaped. Whereas the novel cherished the triumph of human strength, the reunion of the family unit, and the bewilderment of the events happening at random, the film’s framing device leaves Miles isolated, deranged, but believed, and the fate of the planet ultimately unresolved because, of course, the viewer believes, too — or at least has internalised the premise — and can conclude the narrative reasonably.
Film narrative
The film’s investigation is rather psychological at first; the central deliberation is the cause of mass hysteria for those who detect imposters. Miles and Becky cannot decipher the issue: they believe both that the pod people are their actual hosts, and that those who report the infiltration are speaking the truth. It is only the appearance of the half-formed man in Jack’s house that the film erases any doubt as to the existence of the pod people themselves; yet the pods go unexplained. Jack remarks that the body “is waiting for the finished face to be stamped onto it,”Ibid. but how the face would arrive there is treated as a fact that cannot be known. Even Jack’s medallion metaphor from the novel is made into one short line about a coin — it is no longer an explanation, but a metaphor for the inexplicable event before them. The pods are inexplicably there, and soon everywhere, and the fear they evoke is difficult to describe.
The pods inhabit the element of the fantastic, but they go unexplained; they are abject objects of fear, which would mark the film in the genre of horror, not science fiction, yet it cannot be contained there, either — the film inhabits none of the aspects of the tradition of horror before it, and was marketed without gimmick; even the framing story contradicts what would have otherwise been a staple of horror narrative.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers does not privilege the scare of horror, it privileges paranoia above all else. The narrative becomes about running, escaping, questioning all you meet. All else is discarded: Miles does not call the FBI; Miles does not sleep; Miles does not allow himself control over his fear. Instead, McCarthy portrays him with a gradual exhaustion, as at Siegel’s suggestion, “the shots of Kevin’s final scene were filmed just before dawn […] he was at the breaking point of complete exhaustion.”Siegel, Don. A Siegel Film. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. Print.
The film begins to be propelled by offscreen sound suggestions, which lead Miles to new developments in his investigation. The discovery of the half-formed body is preceded by a phone call interrupting a dinner appointment. The discovery of Becky’s pod body in development in her basement is preceded by an offscreen Jack, who stops Miles from making coffee and says, “What about Becky? Do you think she’s all right?”Invasion, dir. Don Siegel. DVD. Miles breaks into houses for his investigation, begins to leave his car while it’s left on in the middle of the road — all in the service of a paranoid desperation left absent from the novel. The score even becomes chaotic, as strings begin to stir like bees when Miles is cut off by the pod telephone operator.
This paranoid narrative structure did not go unnoticed. While the film was not reviewed by most major outlets — not even the New York Times — a Variety reporter noted that the film is “occasionally difficult to follow due to the strangeness of its scientific premise, action nevertheless is increasingly exciting as it builds to a strong climax.”“Walter Wanger’s Line-Up.” Variety. 12 Jan 1955: 10. Web. 23 Feb 2016. Jack Moffitt at The Hollywood Reporter was similarly off-put, as “the mechanics of the plot gimmick are rather sketchily handed in the movie, the actual telling of the story […] contains a great deal of emotion and suspense.”Moffitt, Jack. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The Hollywood Reporter 16 Feb 1956. Print. While there is a lack of generic classification, the action mode still delivers a message of urgent paranoia that seemingly redeemed the film to the few members of the press who reviewed it. Yet how did a Walter Wanger film distributed by Allied Artists go unnoticed, as if it were a B-film? How did the film become such an ambiguous text? When did the generic trappings of its source material become deprioritised in favour of emphasising the total paranoia of the concept, the urge to the viewer to believe as a fellow conspirator, and how was this already-compromised narrative then complicated with the framing story?
Film production
While the highest praise the Variety reviewer could glean for the film was that “with its exploitation potential, film is suitable for top or bottom spot of double bills,”“Walter Wanger’s Line-Up.” Variety. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was no B-film. While Don Siegel recalls it costing “under $300,000,”Siegel, A Siegel Film. Matthew Bernstein in his book Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent pins the precise cost as $411,911,Bernstein, Matthew. Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent. St. Paul, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Print. far above the usual low-budget fare of the B-film. The double bill was becoming more and more a rarity and, of course, as Edwards notes, Allied Artists wished to focus on promoting individual films as features — especially a production by Walter Wanger, who was “responsible for such important Hollywood films as Queen Christina (1933), Gabriel Over the White House (1933), Private Worlds (1935),”LaValley, Al. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Politics, Psychology, Sociology.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ed. Al LaValley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1989. Print. social commentary films nominated for Academy Awards.
Walter Mirisch, as representative for the distributor during the film’s production, provides insight into the studio environment during the era:
Mirisch, Walter. I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2008. Print.
By 1950 it had become overwhelmingly clear that Monogram-Allied Artists had to break out of its niche and get into the first-feature business. […] Competing with television, the accustomed Monogram second features weren’t much better, or even as good, as what you might be able to find on your television set at home, for free. As a result, most theatres changed their exhibition practice to single-feature programs. Our company’s first reaction to this was to develop as many exploitation pictures as we could. Exploitation pictures were modestly budgeted films that lent themselves to strong advertising campaigns.
Mirisch then states that the most outstanding exploitation pictures they ever released were Riot in Cell Block 11 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Mirisch knew Walter had “fallen on hard times” and invited Steve Broidy to arrange for Walter to produce four pictures for Allied Artists — giving him an office, secretary, fees and profit participations, all because “a program of Walter Wanger pictures would be prestigious.”
Wanger negotiated the rights to Invasion of the Body Snatchers after reading just the first instalment of the serial on November 26, 1954.LaValley, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Politics, Psychology, Sociology.” Showing the project to Don Siegel, who worked with him on Riot on Cell Block 11, the two invited Daniel Mainwaring and began to work at the script. The fact that only the first of three parts of the serial were actually released was unimportant to the group, and while LaValley argues that the despairing ending of the film was due to “Mainwaring’s despair […] a onetime strong leftist over the America of the fifties,” Siegel had a history of working closely with writers and even documented his process, remarking that “Danny likes to work closely with the director, talking out a sequence, writing it, then showing it to me. Once we agreed on the pages, I would hand them over to Wanger. He usually liked our ideas and would make a few suggestions, which Danny would rewrite.”Siegel, A Siegel Film.
This collaborative process is upheld by the script revisions: the first on February 10, 1955, had Wanger’s suggestions in blue, and all further revisions contain the exact same order of sequences.LaValley, Al. “Notes on the Continuity Script.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ed. Al LaValley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1989. Print. The first script explains things in greater detail, and people “talk both at greater length and in a more relaxed way.” LaValley attributes these edits as being done in the service of “the line of action” being firmed up. Some minor adjustments even continued to be made by Siegel during shooting long after Mainwaring left payroll, as, for example, a roadblock sequence was exchanged for a montage of police cars. Finally, of great note, is that all three script revisions lack the framing narrative.
Film marketing
Wanger’s various memorandums during the first three screenings of the film display an indecision as to how the film should be marketed. In a memorandum from July 8, 1955, Wanger remarks immediately that “it’s clear we have a very powerful piece of entertainment and a very unusual box office attraction.”Wanger, Walter. “The Body Snatchers.” Memorandum. 8 Jul 1955. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ed. Al LaValley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1989. Print. Wanger’s imperatives are inclined toward “powerful” entertainment, “unique” attractions, challenging social pieces. Wanger believed it needed refinement, however, to be “a little more clear,” a Foreword, in addition to a “sensational campaign.”
His first idea is to secure Orson Welles for opening and ending narration, with a proposed foreword making reference, with Welles playing himself, to his own War of the Worlds, to contrast it with the film, which is a ‘real event.’ Welles would end by imploring the audience to unite, that “we’ve got to stop them!”
If Welles cannot be secured, Wanger suggests Edward Murrow, Lowell Thomas, or Quentin Reynolds, all of whom were newsmen, in order to serve the realism imperative. By using actors who play nonfictional roles, themselves in our world, and associating them with the news, the conspiracy becomes closer to the viewer. Wanger wished not just to make the fantasy real, but culturally ubiquitous. He sought out a “stunning campaign”:
Ibid.
We have to have a Horror Campaign, a Science Fiction Campaign, and a lot of accessories, like buttons saying: “I don’t want to be a pod.” “I’m not a pod.” “Are you a pod?” — a whole pod series of buttons to give out and to try and get the pod concept as popular as the Sally concept was in ‘Private Worlds’ when we put that out.
Years before the gimmicks of William Castle, Walter Wanger was desperate not just to get people into his theatres, but to carry the film with them in a participatory way. By making the metaphor of the pod personal, it could become culturally communicated as easily as language: yes, it is, in fact, an attempt at developing a meme.
The “pod” metaphor
This would all work perfectly, if the metaphor of the pod was consistent — especially among members of the production crew. Don Siegel was especially invested in the metaphor of the pods itself. In an interview with Stuart M. Kaminsky in 1976, Siegel explains that “to be a pod means you have no passion, no anger, the spark has left you.”Siegel, Don. Interview with Stuart M. Kaminsky. 1976. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ed. Al LaValley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1989. Print. Siegel attributes this as being shared with Mainwaring, too:
Ibid.
They exist like cows munching grass, without a care plaguing them. They are incapable of love; passion is unknown. They simply live — breathing, eating, sleeping. Danny and I already knew that many of our associates, acquaintances, and family were already pods. How many of them woke up in the morning, ate breakfast (but never read the newspaper), went to work, returned home to eat again and then sleep?
Kevin McCarthy, in an interview with Tom Hatten, has a less romantic conception of the pods, as he guesses at “some feeling about people working on Madison Avenue, they have no hearts at all, these advertising people who just turn out material and sell things, just unemotionally.”McCarthy, Kevin. Interview with Tom Hatten. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Republic Pictures, 1998. DVD.
Walter Wanger himself only used the metaphor in the service of his cultural ubiquity imperative — it is unclear whether he actually believed in it as passionately as his nonconformist director, Don Siegel. In a speech to the American Booksellers Convention, Wanger says the film shows how easy it is to lose their souls “if they are not alert and determined in their character to be free.”Wanger, Walter. Speech to the American Booksellers Convention. N.d. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ed. Al LaValley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1989. Print.
Wanger relates it directly to the notion of bookselling as he swears that:
Ibid.
whenever I meet a man or a woman who says, “I’m too busy to read,” I know that I am talking to somebody that is a pod and can be taken over by an enemy.”
While the metaphor of the pod is a nonconformist conception of those who are not living the right way — a kind of Platonic ideal and worship of the rebel — the kind of enemy is confused depending on each member of the crew, and as a central characteristic of a product leads to total incoherence.
Mirisch himself reminisces about “reading a magazine article arguing that the picture was about the Communist infiltration of America. From personal knowledge, neither Walter Wanger nor Don Siegel […] nor Dan Mainwaring […] nor the original author, Jack Finney, nor myself saw it as anything other than a thriller.”Mirich.
That Mirisch is so oblivious to his production crew’s deep investment in the nonconformist presence is absolutely fitting: Siegel calls Allied Artists “bursting at the seams with pods” as they “took Wanger’s and my cut and edited out all the humour.”Siegel, A Siegel Film.
Film recuts
Why did Allied Artists interfere with what they saw as a standard thriller? Why did Wanger proceed without his sensational campaign nor his foreword? As Don Siegel recounts with Guy Beaucourt in 1972:
Siegel, Don. Interview with Guy Beaucourt. 1972. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ed. Al LaValley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1989. Print.
There were three previews of the film as I’d made it, and the audience reacted in an extraordinary way, just as I’d hoped. They started out laughing, but then the tension increased and they ended up thoroughly scared. The final scene was the one where the hero runs out into the highway, trying to stop a car, and he points his finger at one of the drivers — in reality, at the audience — shouting “You’re next!” like at a trial. But having heard the audiences laugh, the studios thought the public was reacting against the film and didn’t realise what the laughter really meant.
The film was funny at the insistence of Siegel and Wanger, who desired deeply to make the idea of the pods seem “as normally and naturally as possible […] We therefore had the various characters […] pay little or no attention to this silly rumour. But when they were suddenly face to face with the monstrous horror, their reaction was startlingly frightening.”Siegel, A Siegel Film.
Allied Artists was adamant, due to an “old-fashioned credo”Siegel. Interview with Stuart M. Kaminsky. from its Monogram days that a horror film had no room for humour, and so reacted harshly against the previews. Wanger, on August 24 1955, remarks that the fourth preview was “least effective.”Wanger, Walter. Memorandum to Myself. 24 Aug 1955. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ed. Al LaValley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1989. Print. “Although some of the laughs were eliminated, also a great deal of humanity and quality of the picture were eliminated by sharp, so-called ‘B’ cutting.”
In removing the natural progression from humour to terror, Allied Artists had made the movie into a pod. They insisted on the framing device, and Siegel and Mainwaring shot accordingly, as Siegel believed he may as well do it the best he could given the circumstances.Siegel. Interview with Stuart M. Kaminsky. Regardless of the edits made, the film still did not see release until ten months after it finished shooting, in 1956. Invasion of the Body Snatchers resisted becoming an exploitation picture — the pod of the cinema — and so could not be easily marketed.
Conclusions
Through a description of its modern reception, it was established that Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a ‘prismic text’ — a site of contrasting readings due to a sparse, paranoid metaphor easily refitted to different contexts.
Using an elucidation of Kyle Edwards’ history of the Monogram studio, it was clear that Monogram was in the process of developing an A-studio, Allied Artists, yet the studio never quite shed its B-film tendencies.
By comparing the Finney novel to the final film cut, it was also apparent that the film lost a great deal of science fiction and horror generic conventions in favour of a paranoid, active narrative that privileged viewer participation and emotional investment.
Allied Artists had hired Walter Wanger to produce exploitation pictures, in order to seem prestigious, but then mutilated his film to remove his tendencies toward social commentary to better fit the thriller narrative. While Wanger, Mainwaring, and Siegel wrote the script while the original book was not yet released, they also were able to reform the material toward the metaphor of the pod, of which all three were decidedly differently minded.
Wanger, eager to transform his film into an element of our cultural lexicon, proposed various measures to bring the film closer to the viewer, including using newsmen, pins, common references to the film text in everyday language, and retooling the metaphors that related ‘pods’ to everyday workers, like booksellers.
In various interviews, Kevin McCarthy, Don Siegel, and Walter Wanger all seem to depict the metaphor of the pod differently, but all with a certain nonconformist appeal against those who live like vegetables, and the metaphor was lost upon Allied Artists, who did not understand the film’s progression from humour to terror: the everyday progression that mimicked our responses as viewers as if viewing the pods in reality.
By implementing the frame story and waiting ten months to release the film, its social commentary aspects were removed and a thrilling, vague film was left: a contrasting text that continues, regardless of its attempted transformation into a pod, to capture us, instead.