Overview
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Release Date:
5 February 1956 (USA)
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Tagline:
... there was nothing to hold onto - except each other.
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Plot:
A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.
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User Comments:
Siegel's classic paranoia flick still gives me the creeps.
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| James V. King | .... | additional camera operator: final sequence (uncredited) |
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Additional Details
Also Known As:
Sleep No More
They Came from Another World (USA) (working title)
Walter Wanger's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (USA) (complete title)
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Runtime:
80 min
Aspect Ratio:
2.00 : 1
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Sound Mix:
Mono (Perspecta Sound encoding) (Western Electric Recording)
Fun Stuff
Trivia:
Only $15,000 of the budget was spent on special effects.
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Goofs:
Continuity: Water stains on the planks in the mine.
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FAQ
What happens to the human's body after the pod has taken it over?
A Note Regarding Spoilers
Where do the pods come from?
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Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is most famous as a thinly veiled Communist allegory, with its emotionless pod people, 'a malignant disease, slowly taking over the country', as leading man Kevin McCarthy (whose surname just can't be coincidental) puts it. And, thanks to Siegel's craft, it is an effective thriller. One can't help but be effected by McCarthy's desperate attempts to alert his fellow Americans to the threat, before it's too late.
The film is presented to us as a flashback, with McCarthy explaining the take-over of his town to the extremely sceptical authorities. This is a brilliant device as, unlike with most flashback narratives (especially those in film noir), we don't know how the film will resolve itself. Whereas noir flashbacks begin at the end of the story in order to create a sense of foreboding, Bodysnatchers reverses this, creating an uncertainty that contributes to the central theme of paranoia.
The film is beautifully photographed in crisp, 1950s monochrome. There is an interesting contrast between this photorealism, and the more artificial aspects of the cinematography dark shadows cast across faces etc which is suggestive of the duality of the inhabitants of the small Californian town. My favourite scene is McCarthy's striking address to camera in the final act, which must be one of the earliest examples of breaking the fourth wall in film (in Hollywood at least, if not cinema in general), and is one of the most memorable images in screen history.
While the running time doesn't allow for much character development, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is a thrilling film, turning human beings into cold, unfeeling monsters. Whether you agree with its politics or not won't have any effect on your enjoyment of this science fiction classic.