INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS @ 70 (Spoilers)

Local doctor Miles gets back to town to find a number of people are claiming that family members have been replaced. Mothers, Uncles, children have suddenly changed to strangers. They look and talk the same and even have the right memories but there's an essence lacking. Miles dismisses this at first but is haunted by the number of cases being reported. One night, he is called to a friend's house, the town bohemian, as it happens, and finds an indentical copy of him lying on the billard table. The body is perfect but lacks all the signs of decades of life. When the guy accidentallky cuts his hand, a cut appears on the copy. Phone calls here, hurried drives there, the town is being taken over by people who form in giant pods and takeover their assigned bodies while those are asleep. A quiet and thorough invasion from space.

This, the invasion and evasion, is the plot but the threads are concerned with the loss of that essential humanity. When the pod people have a chance to speak, they appeal to the painlessness of their new form, no love but also no hate, no shame, no guilt. A moment of cornered affection between Miles and his love Becky negates that promise and firms their resolve to resist. 

It's the question of resistance that has driven both ends of the political spectrum to claim Invasion of the Body Snatchers for themselves. In the '50s of its birth, you can easily see how the McCarthyite watchdogs would see this dehumanisation as communism, the collective over the individual. But it's just as easy to see a critique of the apple pie conformity assumed by the anti communists. If you've got sides, it's plain fun to accuse the other one of being pod people.

What is clear is that mobs are mobs and the threat of control by them is terrifying. The scene before the mobs form is one of chilling conformity as the small town seems to move as one organism, appearing from the footpaths and silently swarming to the town square to recieve their new pods from delivery trucks. If you saw this in the mid-'50s in the USA it would have frozen you, either way you looked at it. The idea that the other is yourself is a perfectly hit note for the times. While this film keeps things a lot more grounded than I Married a Monster from Outer Space (a LOT less cheesy than its title) it knows its audience well.

And it had durability. Body Snatchers is one of the few horror movies that is cited as an exception to the rule of the inferiority of remakes. Along with The Thing and The Fly, this one was successfully reinserted into later cultures only it was redone well more than once which gives it the edge. In 1978 the me-generation with its psychobabble gets infiltrated by pod versions of itself that are beyond empathy. 1993's Bodysnatchers put the story into a military context (nuff said).

This original from mid century America with its poster pefect couple (Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter) does carry the first told charm. Miles's lustful banter with Becky feels like old man entitlement now but it does get well batted back by Becky and then the stakes between them are raised as it resolves as love to face the challenge of never feeling that again. A little context tolerance allows that indulgence effortlessly. The incident that breaks the couple's humanity while surrounded by the pod people concerns the safety of a dog. Later, in 1978 (which did not fall back on the love switch) this has become the sight of a monstrosity. A scream will always turn you in.

The original cut of this film (which did not make it to the first release) did not include the framing scenes in a Los Angeles police station where the raving Miles is calmed and tells his tale. There was a home video release without these scenes which starts in normality an ends in panic as Miles screams futilely in the middle of a busy highway that everyone around him will be next, at one point yelling it down the camera to the audience. In the early days o' DVD I bought a cheapo with a terrible transfer which featured this ending. This was my first viewing of it and it played very strongly. There had been a campaign to offer this restored form but it couldn't make it to the people who made the decisions about it, even as an alternative version. That's a pity as, without the reassurance of the good guys in the big city taking control with an early warning, the prospect was nightmarish. My scrubbed up 4K which looks so beautiful might have been presented with the Ur potency. But no.

Lifting the filter of vintage cinema and mores and presenting this version to today's America makes things a lot less tame in light of the apparent shift toward authoritarianism and hive mindedness. Imagine the January 6th insurrection done as a quiet swarm and you'll get the idea.

Viewing notes: I watched Kino Lorber's excellent 4K release, choosing the standard widescreen presentation over the offered 2:1 alternative (both were released originally). I'm calling it a 70th anniversary despite it normally being considered a 1956 release as I noticed it said MCMLV in the credit sequence. I was using it as a pallet cleanser from the excerable V/H/S/Halloween which was mostly tedious garbage. It was good to see the clean lines, solid characters and thoughtful craft of this one after that mess. At time of writing there are no local releases of this on physical media. It can be hired through Prime, Apple and YouTube.

SUNSET BOULEVARD @ 75

Joe Gillis came to Hollywood to make his fortune after dazzling the bosses of the dream factory with his genius. After a few B-movies he's hawking around his latest mediocrity and getting shown the door when his own door thunders with the sound of repo men after his car. He blarneys his way out of it but when he is seen driving the jalopy by those very agents, he takes evasive action and darts into the first ungated driveway he can find, parks the beast in the open garage and starts walking away, calculating his next move. When the woman in the window yells at him that he's late and he'd better get in there, he follows as only the down at heel can, because it's better than the motel room.

But this isn't just some Hollywood broad, an old dowager ordering a pool clean, it's former silent movie superstar Norma Desmond. Once he clears up the misunderstanding that he's not actually there to inter the dead chimpanzee on the slab in a shiny white coffin, and that he's actually a writer for the movies, he's kind of hired. Why? Well, Norma has a notion to break back into the flickers with a script as long as the Bible about Salome with her as the star, of course. Ulp! Well, if it gets the debt guys off his back, he's in. After all, as shes just assured him, she's still big, it's the movies that got small.

This Mad Hatter's tea party scenario from 1950 is one of Hollywood's most damning self portraits. If Singing in the Rain softened the notion of Hollywood hope two years later, Sunset Boulevard gave it a big chore. Its combined noir cynicism and deflating pathos create a kind of ethereal horror by which the favours of tinsel town demand the entirety of their applicants. Billy Wilder and co. even supply a more measured image of honest work with the figures of younger people taking more practical paths to careers but Norma's crazed hunger and Joe's own unquestioned opportunism to be elevated by it are the things that leave that bad taste. The focus is on the freak show, not the bright young things. That is what still makes this film essential viewing for anyone who fancies themself a likely player.

Norma's screenplay is a mass of hopeless narcissism and Joe's attempts at editing it, when discovered, are absorbed into her host's ingestion of him as parasite. Of course, he resists being bought at the beginning but he has neither idea nor defence against someone whose riches flowed in from staged histrionics and interpersonal atrocities. For any of his resistance, Joe knows he's signed the contract and, saving opportunity, is effectively doomed. We also know, from the opening scene and narration, that he didn't make it out. We meet him visually floating face down in the swimming pool. We're finding out how he got there.

The tuned casting of this is essential. William Holden was still young but wise enough in his carriage and demeanour to convince us to get behind him. His narration is the same husky snark of a Phillip Marlowe or Same Spade except it begins with a bitterness that both would avoid. 

The real coup is Gloria Swanson. She was a star of silent cinema. She did know De Mille and all the others. She knew the adoration, the parties and the endless champagne and attention. And her career, though it continued beyond the switch to sound, faded steadily to the point when she was more than ready for this. Among all those stars from the Hollywood firmament, she did know the tragedies and horror tales, the delusional and the heartrending. Though not one of them herself, she is in this role speaking for them, not just like them. If anything, she is more authentic and compassionate than the real life Cecil B. DeMille who appears in an extended cameo. Norma's quiet and stern butler is given a hate-filled gravity by silent auteur Josef von Sternberg. This film ain't kidding around. It is to Swanson's persistent credit that her own grotesque turn raises her to triumph in this sordid fable.

Sunset Boulevard was one of David Lynch's favourite films and it's easy to see why. It is an ornate nightmare of masks and fugue states set in a Hollywood that knows how stinking and cruel it always was. This would play seamlessly with Lynch's own attempt, Mulholland Drive, the pair of them craving deep into the horrors of delusion with the most convincing beauty.

Viewing notes: I saw this as Paramount's stunning 4K presentation. However, this one is always around. Not quite a Casablanca or Wizard of Oz, it's been treated well for home video from the DVD era on. If you don't want to commit to a home 4K you could easily come upon it at an op shop for a few bucks. I first saw it on midday TV and was capitvated but that doesn't happen anymore.