Starring: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum
Directed by: Philip Kaufman
Studio: UA/MGM/20th Century Fox (2-disc set)
Video: 1.85:1 widescreen anamorphic/enhanced, color
Audio: English Dolby Surround, French Dolby mono, Spanish Dolby Surround
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Extras: Commentary Track by Philip Kaufman, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pod – featurette, Practical Magic: The Special Effects Pod – featurette, The Man Behind the Scream: The Sound Effects Pod – featurette, The Invasion Will Be Televised: The Cinematography – featurette, Original theatrical trailer
Length: 117 minutes
Rating: *****
The 1954 sci-fi novel by Jack Finney has turned out to really have legs, in show biz lingo. The whole paranoid slant of The Body Snatchers fit in perfectly with the concerns of the 1950s, and the very-low-budget original B&W movie of l956 with Kevin McCarthy (who has a cameo in this one) is considered to probably have best captured the tense tenor of those times. It’s a surprise to read today that there was actually controversy then as to whether the paranoia was about the Communists or about that Other McCarthy. (It was about the senator, unrelated to the actor.)
The original Body Snatchers was a classic, but so much was changed and expanded in Kaufman’s version that it wasn’t totally a remake. There’s more characters and more action. The environment was switched from a small rural town to the big city, and San Francisco was chosen due to the impersonality of crowds in the metropolis and other details such as the New Age connection (Nimoy playing a feel-good psychologist while leaning on Mr. Spock’s logical approach) and the predilection for having many green plants indoors. The latter “Flower Power” idea tied in with the newly-arrived from-outer-space pod plants not even being noticed.
I haven’t listened to a director’s commentary track all the way thru for some time, but I accidentally hit the wrong button, got Kaufman’s track and ended up staying with it for the entire film because it was so informative and interesting. He stops at a few points of vital dialog and the original track is brought up in level – a nice touch. While the film’s budget was three million, it was still rather low, and Kaufman is proud of explaining that the art materials for the original seed-like pod creatures and their planet in outer space cost only $10.
This is not your typical sci-fi movie by any means. For one thing there are no hi-tech space ships, robots or monsters. The “duplicate” pod people look just like the humans they have replaced, except that they have no passion, anger, or love. The original director, Don Siegel (also in this version as a pod cab driver) observed “Many of my associates are pods.”
There were new twists on the conspiratorial terror of the 1950s in San Francisco of the late 1970s. Two terrible catastrophes occurred just prior to the film’s release: The murders of Mayor George Moscone and City Councilman Harvey Milk, and the mass suicide of over 900 people at Jim Jones’ People’s Temple. The cinematographer explains in one of the featurettes (the second disc of short extras is well worth watching) that he just shot random footage of people walking on the downtown streets or looking out the windows of a bus, and it worked perfectly to ramp up the feeling of paranoia and something being very wrong, due to the juxtaposition with the other scenes around it. An interesting revelation of the extras is that Sutherland did all the dangerous action stuff himself, trying to destroy the giant pod nursery. In fact an extra was badly burned due to not following directions and seeking the limelight by getting too close to Sutherland when some pyrotechnics were involved.
As the film progresses, more and more of the birth and transformation process of the pods is shown, but the replacement of the first human doesn’t involve a pod at all – just a blossom in a glass taken innocently from a pod in the garden. This doesn’t quite fit with what is shown later. Also, the screwed-up “birthing” process which puts the banjo player’s face (his playing was dubbed in by Jerry Garcia) on his dog-pod is just plain silly. The production very successfully sought a campy film noir effect by reducing the saturation of color and using creepy lighting and canted camera angles. The acting is fine and the close relationship between Sutherland and Adams seems very genuine. The transfer is excellent, with considerable detail in the many dark portions of the screen – much of the film was shot at night. Although this was prior to Dolby Digital 5.1, the Dolby people used Body Snatchers as a good demonstration of surround sound, though it had only a mono surround channel. There is a scene in which two motorcycle cops pass the taxi in the Broadway tunnel and you should hear the cycles behind you. I tried this several times but couldn’t get it to image behind me. A subtle touch in the sound department is that early in the movie there are natural nature sounds such as crickets, birds, wind in the trees, but as the pods take over these are silenced for only the sounds of garbage trucks, cars, footsteps etc.
Yet a third Body Snatchers was made in 1994 (with the same producer as this one), and a fourth is now in the theaters, starring Nicole Kidman. From what I’ve read, both can be easily avoided.
– John Sunier
