Body Snatchers
ID: 050528.0903
Time recently published its list of the "ALL-TIME 100 best films as chosen by TIME's movie critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel." Included among Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and Psycho is the one film I know most about, the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Corliss and Schickel's details about the film however, are almost all wrong. The most egregious is the oft-quoted comment that Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a "parable about McCarthyism."
Let's start with a little thing. Jack Finney is listed as the author of the novel, The Body Snatchers, upon which the film was based. Many writers believe this to be true because Finney's novel was published in 1955, a year before the film was released. In fact, both Finney's novel and the film are based on Finney's own three-part serial in the last three issues of Collier's magazine for 1954; November 26, December 10, and December 24. There are significant differences between the serial and its novelized version, not the least of which are the endings.
But the bigger issue is McCarthyism. (One wonders whether this erroneous idea stems from the fact that the star of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was Kevin McCarthy, rather than from some reference to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's senate hearings.) McCarthyism has become synonymous with "witch hunts," and "finding a Communist under every bed"; of paranoia, false accusations, and wild-eyed Republicans running amuck. Beyond that however, I doubt most know more.
Wisconsin attorney Joseph R. McCarthy was elected to the Senate in 1946. In 1950, he charged that over 200 Communists had infiltrated the State Department. Upon his reelection in 1952, he became chairman of the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations, and resumed his accusations. In November 1954, as the first installlment of Finney's The Body Snatchers was being published, McCarthy was replaced as chairman of the investigating committee. Soon thereafter, the Senate condemned McCarthy, and he disappeared from the public scene.
Given the close proximity in time between the publication of The Body Snatchers serial, and the end of McCarthy's senate hearings, it's easy to see how one could confuse concurrence with causality. Arguing against it are two things: Jack Finney and his work. In a letter to Stephen King (see Stephen King, Danse Macabre, 1981), Jack Finney said:
I have read explanations of the "meaning" of this story, which amuse me, because there is no meaning at all; it was just a story meant to entertain, with no more meaning than that. … I've always been amused by the contentions of people connected with the picture that they had a message of some sort in mind. … since they followed my story very closely, it's hard to see how [any] message crept in. … The idea of writing a whole book in order to say that it's not really a good thing for us all to be alike, and that individuality is a good thing, makes me laugh.
In an interview included with the 1996 Silver Screen Classics DVD of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the film's star, Kevin McCarthy, backed up Finney's statement. When asked "what the movie truely means … a lot of people equated it with the McCarthy era," Kevin McCarthy said, "I thought this was about people who work on Madison Avenue … I never felt it had any political significance … after the fact, people began to find it 'politically suitable.'"
Kevin McCarthy's hypothesis makes a lot of sense. Prior to becoming a writer, Jack Finney made his living as an advertising executive in New York. His 1963 book, Good Neighbor Sam (also made into a movie), a comedy about an advertising executive, is partly autobiographical.
Jack Finney is one of the great "unknown" American writers. Those who know his name know it either for The Body Snatchers, or Time and Again, and its sequel, Time After Time. He was however, much more prolific. In the period Senator McCarthy was active, Jack Finney published 22 short stories, two of them, 5 Against the House, and The Body Snatchers, three part serials. None of them have any political content. Ten are slice-of-life romances. Eight are science fiction, including Finney's first SF story, The Third Level. The rest are comedies and adventures. At the same time Finney was publishing The Body Snatchers, and working on its book version, he'd finished the book version of 5 Against the House, which had also been made into a film. If there is any influence on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it is Finney's own story, Obituary, about a man who becomes someone else when he sleeps.
If there is a movie influenced by McCarthyism, it's certainly John Frankenheimer's 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate. (The 2004 remake scarcely resembles the original.) Senator McCarthy was in fact the model for Senator John Yerkes Iselin.
You tell 'em! People these days love to sound authoritative by connecting things for the sake of sounding like they know it all. Additionally, Corliss and Schickel didn't do their homework to make sure their assumptions were true. Just talking heads.
Reviews "relate" to people, "communicate" with verbal expression. What these biggie reviewers do not understand is that we want to hear their personal experience, not their pseudo-authority figure perspective. They are pandering to us for the price of ongoing popularity, denying us the view of their reality and emotional response to the movie, which are aspects important for us to know so we can make an informed decision about whether we want to see it. They're simply not delivering the goods! And we are, of course, at fault because we don't call them on it.
Ah, well. Thanks again for making me think about things.
— Anne Mehaffey