The Talkies/Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Yagoda, Ben
THE TALKIES by Ben Yagoda Invasion of the Body Snatchers The current remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers marks a considerable improvement over the last aliens-from-space film, the...
...Most important, the body-snatch theme meshes with the late 1970s culture of feeling...
...Moreover, the film loses all suspense once the nature of the threat has been established...
...In the crowded theater where I saw the film, there was hardly a clap when Sutherland made his heroic last attack...
...They join Sutherland and Adams in resistance, and the four of them make up a riveting ensemble...
...THE TALKIES by Ben Yagoda Invasion of the Body Snatchers The current remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers marks a considerable improvement over the last aliens-from-space film, the sentimental Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
...If they keep on like this, Close Encounters of the Nineteenth Kind will be a masterpiece...
...Nevertheless, Body Snatchers falls short of its progenitor in two crucial respects...
...Of course, director Phil Kaufman and screenwriter W.D...
...They have improved on Siegel in other ways...
...Don Siegel's original hit closer to home than The Exorcist because it was less improbable: People kept their natural voices and appearances and did not become obnoxious, but there was something different...
...Richter deserve more credit than the times for the film's success...
...Audiences are hungry, first off, for films about space...
...Not only is it wittier, more sophisticated, and more entertaining, but it displays a salubrious skepticism toward interplanetary visitors...
...When Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) suspects that something terrible has happened to her boy friend, a best-selling author-psychologist (Leonard Nimoy) tells her she's projecting her feelings about the love affair: "People are stepping in and out of relationships too quickly.'' The snatchers-affectless and laid-back-are like clones of the blissed-out fellow who stops you on the street and says, "May I walk with you...
...First, the explicitness of this version, horrific though the special effects may be, makes the story less scary: Somehow we are a little relieved when we find out exactly how the snatching process occurs...
...It was a provocative idea-not, as is often maintained, because it commented on McCarthyist paranoia, but because it probed sensitive psychic regions...
...The clincher is the line one of them gives to the last human rebel (Donald Sutherland): "Don't be trapped into old concepts...
...But this is clearly a propitious time to redo Body Snatchers...
...Kaufman and Richter have added two marvelous characters, played by Jeff Gold-blum and Veronica Cartright: He's a poet who writes a line every six months (because he chooses "each word individually"), and she manages a Turkish bath and thinks Velikovsky is must reading...
...It's fun guessing whether or when Nimoy has been snatched-he's spookily mellow from the beginning...
...Most notably, the characters are fleshed-out-something the 80-minute original had no time for...
...More often than not, remakes aren't worth the effort: Remember (if you can) the version of The Philadelphia Story with Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, and Louis Armstrong...
...The conclusion-not the happy ending of the original-is inevitable, and the noble efforts of the band of four seem rather pointless...
...Why, by the same token, should we expect them to smile and say, "Have a nice day...
...sonalities...
...We can see why Sutherland would fight the aliens: He's a city health inspector who rejoices when he finds a rat turd in an overpriced French restaurant...
...The original Invasion (1956) imagined what would happen if a race of malevolent aliens subtly took over our bodies and perBen Yagoda is a free-lance writer living in New York...
...It exploited the conventional, Hitch-cockian fear of proclaiming the truth and not being believed (only two people know what's going on), as well as the two deeper terrors of sleep (when the aliens did their work) and possession...
...One character remarks, "Why do we always expect them to come in metal ships...
...But things are definitely getting better in the big-budget sci-fi wars...
...The film's herbal paranoia-the aliens initially arrive in the form of plants-neatly reverberates in the current climate of fern-worship...
...Other recent movies (notably Semi-Tough and The Big Fix) have taken potshots at psychobabble, cultism, and self-help, but here, for the first time, the critique is integral to the film...
Vol. 12 • February 1979 • No. 2
