INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS 1978

Smart movies are hard to come by. Smart remakes…near impossible. Why?

Well, maybe it’s because Hollywood’s attitude towards remakes is built on a kind of Catch-22 logic: If a film is poorly made and flops at the boxoffice—precisely the type of film, one would assume, to best benefit from being remade—Hollywood won’t touch it. However, if a film is accomplished and financially successful (leaning towards classic-status), superfluous existence aside, Hollywood can’t seem to wait to get a crack at churning out a remake.

Wholly motivated by a studio’s desire to repeat an earlier triumph and capitalize on brand recognition without having to break a sweat, most remakes are cynical, dumbed-down affairs tricked-up with new technology and a paucity of inspiration. The lazier, more arrogant cousin of the sequel, remakes (which, by definition, presume an improvement over the original) have been responsible for some of the most painful moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had; e.g., The Stepford Wives (2004), The Haunting (1999), and The Women (2008). Just to name a few.

Yet, as if to prove the rule by exception, every now and then, when a remake is inspired by an idea rather than an accountant’s ledger, the results can be surprising, fresh, even transcendent. Such is the case with Phillip Kaufman’s shrewd and remarkably effective remake of the 1956 sci-fi/horror classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Donald Sutherland as Matthew Bennell

Brooke Adams as Elizabeth Driscoll

Jeff Goldblum as Jack Bellicec

Veronica Cartwright as Nancy Bellicec

Leonard Nimoy as Dr. David Kibner

The original Don Siegel film was a little B-movie masterpiece of paranoia and dread which, intentionally or not, tapped into America’s ambivalence to post-war conformity and anxiety over the anti-communist panic of McCarthyism. Staying true to the core story line of the original, Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (a deliciously pulpy title I’m glad the remake didn't abandon) is about an invasion of plant-like organisms from space that duplicate and replace human life—sans emotions. Life continues as before, the sole casualty (and ultimate tragedy) being a loss of personality and individuality.

The timeless appeal of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (it’s been remade at least two other times) may have a lot to do with the fact that we’re a culture which clings to the notion of individuality in the abstract, yet values conformity in the concrete. Even a cursory glimpse at the “comments” section of any Internet news site reveals that tolerance for opposing points of views and ways of life is not exactly America’s strong suit. Yet that doesn’t stop each of us from harboring, deep within our democratic bosoms, the romantic belief that we honor, above all else, the individual’s right to be just that: an individual.

What's HE doing here?
Robert Duvall's unbilled cameo as an unidentified priest  suspiciously eyeing Brooke Adams
as she picks one of the flowers that figure so significantly in the plot, was appropriately mysterious
enough to seriously unsettle 1978 audiences when the film premiered

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What makes this Invasion of the Body Snatchers such a chilling delight is how acutely, and with such perceptive wit, it captures the mood and preoccupations of a particular point and place in time, and uses it to breathe fresh life into a familiar horror tale. The late Ira Levin (with both Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives) was a master at this sort of thing: creating tension out of tapping into the core anxieties lying at the center of a shifting cultural climate.

Instead of the small town setting of the original, the 1978 film makes the most of its “Me Decade” angst and takes place in that most defiantly individualistic of American cities; San Francisco. Which is, conceptually speaking, perfection personified. Where better to rage a war against conformity than a city which prides itself on being a haven for the eccentric, the unique, and the idiosyncratic.

San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid
Throughout the film, shots are composed that juxtapose the unique elements of San Francisco's
unique "personality" with the threat of impending dehumanization and a loss of individuality

For those too young to have experienced the '70s firsthand, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an affectionate, but nonetheless spot-on, skewering of a certain West Coast sensibility. I was attending an arts college in San Francisco in 1978, and this film captures the feel of the time so authentically, it tweaks serious pangs of nostalgia every time I watch it. Seriously, most of the people I attended class with at The San Francisco Art Institute were like the characters played by Cartwright and Goldblum. 

The San Francisco of Invasion of The Body Snatchers is the post-"hippie movement" San Francisco when the aging, free-love crowd had to make room for the navel-gazing yuppie. It was an age of alternatives: alternative medicine, alternative religion and alternative thinking. The media was full of cults, causes, conspiracy theories, est training, and best-selling pop psychologists. Communal living and fighting for social causes was replaced by pride in ownership (restored Victorian apartments became symbols of yuppie affluence) and a reverence for privacy and personal space (as exemplified by the high-tech stereo headphones worn by the character, Geoffrey). Ecology buttons replaced peace signs, and a 1973 book titled “The Sound of Music and Plants” by Dorothy Retallck (detailing the effects of music on plant growth…a point referenced humorously in the film) was just part of a larger exaltation of urban plant life and vegetation in general.

As in all times of social realignment, unacknowledged social anxiety and unease is part of the adaptive cultural landscape. It makes sense to me that in a city as welcoming of change as San Francisco, the perceptive observer might also notice a distinct edginess and uncertainty behind the city's composed veneer of blissed-out broad-mindedness.

This barely perceptible nervousness is precisely what director Phillip Kaufman and screenwriter W.D. Richter seize on in Invasion of the Body Snatchers to provide a contemporary kick to the sci-fi, body-switching horror. The threat appears to come from deep space, but when it comes down to it, what’s most frightening about the whole body-snatching idea is the possibility that what we most cling to in an interdependent way among friends and loved ones (our individuality), is what is least valued about us from a societal perspective. 

It hardly feels unintentional that the pod people taking over San Francisco are undetectable precisely because of their behavioral similarity to the urban professionals whose infiltration had been threatening the city’s loosey goosey vibe since the early '70s. Nor are we meant to ascertain unequivocally whether or not the psychobabble of Leonard Nimoy’s paperback psychologist is pod-talk or just the new language of the New-Age.

PERFORMANCES

It always puzzles me the way so many directors of horror and suspense films overlook the obvious fact that the effectiveness of any horror film rests in whatever investment the audience has in the fate of the protagonists. Take time to flesh out the characters and there’s no telling how far an audience will go with your premise.

This is especially true with a film whose plot pivots on that intangible quality known as “humanity.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers appears to have been cast with an eye towards emphasizing the idiosyncrasies of its stars, and it makes a world of difference in how we respond to all the genre trappings of chases, close calls, and suspicious red herrings. Donald Sutherland, sporting the same curly locks from 1973's Don’t Look Now, has always been a kind of goofy, off-beat leading man. He’s not the lantern-jawed, hero type, so he comes off a believably strong, yet vulnerable enough for you never to be quite sure if he’s up to the task at hand.

 Brooke Adams is one of my favorite underrated actresses. She was among a small group of intelligent, distinctive actresses (like Geneviève Bujold) the '70s produced and then discarded when audience tastes turned to bland prettiness. Not anybody's idea of a cookie-cutter actress, Adams establishes herself and her character almost immediately. And in much the same way (and to similar effect) as Paula Prentiss' uniqueness is used in The Stepford Wives; the threat of Adams' distinctiveness being lost to flatlining conformity is made all the more acute by the casting. 

As good as Adams and Sutherland are (and Adams is amazing), the prizes have to go to Jeff Goldblum and Angela Cartwright. As just kind of couple you’d expect to find in San Francisco (they run a mud-bath establishment; he’s a poet, she’s one of those espousers of crackpot theories who nevertheless always sounds more sane than the people around her). They are a hilarious and touching pair, and I daresay that without their contribution, as excellent a film as Invasion of the Body Snatchers is, it wouldn’t soar the way it does.

And let’s not leave out Leonard Nimoy. I’ve never been a fan of Star Trek and no doubt I have a minimal awareness of his gifts as an actor, but I must say his role as the infuriatingly logical psychologist is an inspired bit of casting. Audiences were never likely to shed their image of him as Spock, so I like that the film intentionally makes use of our predisposed sense of him in a way that doesn’t intrude, but rather enhances.

A trade paper ad promoting Veronica Cartwright for Academy Award consideration

THE STUFF  OF FANTASY

Missed Opportunity or Cultural Sensitivity?

Perhaps it’s a sign of Kaufman’s good taste, but as a gay man, I find it hard to imagine how a film about human cloning set in San Francisco could resist the impulse to include a scene on Castro Street; home of the “Castro Street Clone.” For the uninitiated, The Castro is a gay district in San Francisco where (at least during the '70s) free-thinking gay men willfully abandoned all personal individuality so as to look identical to one another. Sporting identical mustaches, haircuts, clothing, and physiques, the Castro Street Clone was a city mainstay, as identifiable and generic to San Francisco as the Transamerica building. To poke fun at a subculture's need to unify by obliterating differences seems right in line with what the film sought to lampoon.

And yet, thinking back, I recall with great sadness that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released about a month after the murder of openly-gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the murder of Mayor George Moscone. Under these circumstances there would have been no place in the film for a reference of this nature. I might have this wrong, but I even seem to remember that a jokey line of dialog Donald Sutherland speaks to psychologist Nimoy (“The Mayor’s a patient of yours, isn’t he?”) may have been temporarily cut out of sensitivity.

In any event, it was strange watching a movie with so many scenes taking place at its City Hall. San Francisco felt like a very scary place at the time, and, as one might imagine, that tragic real-life event—auguring a mounting intolerance and conservatism in the city known for its liberalism—only made watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers an even more unsettling experience than it already was.

"It was like the whole city had changed overnight."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I don’t know if director Phillip Kaufman is an admirer of Roman Polanski, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a film I’m certain Polanski would appreciate. From the very first frames there is attention paid to establishing an atmosphere of ever-escalating paranoia and claustrophobia. Every shot contains something—whether in the foreground or distance—which supports these themes. Plants are in almost every shot, sometimes crowding the frame creating a small space of activity for the actors. There’s a brilliant sense of danger taking place beyond the confines of the story we’re witnessing. People are seen running in the distance, every window seems to have someone staring out of it. The tension grows to the point that even banal human rituals like flossing take on an ominous air (Elizabeth’s boyfriend is seen flossing in an early scene, later at a secret meeting in Union Square Donald Sutherland’s character passes a man flossing in public). 

Of course, it’s wonderful that all this ambiance is piled on and we’re left to fill in many of the blanks ourselves. The act of which engages us even further and pulls us into the story.

I've always liked how Sutherland's shattered windshield (result of a run in with disgruntled restaurant staff) never gets repaired and offers us a view of a city fractured. Reminds me of how Polanski has Jack Nicholson spend the lion's share of Chinatown with a huge bandage on his nose. Its incongruity and hint of unexpected violence is unsettling.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has the most amusingly witty and dark screenplay. Here are just a smattering of my favorite lines:

Jack: "Of course it's a conspiracy"
Matthew: "What is?"
Jack: "Everything!"

Nancy: (recoiling from a lifesize pod replica of her husband) "Jack, don't touch it! You don't know where it's been!"

Jack: "Who are you calling?"
Matthew: "Washington."
Jack: "What...the CIA? The FBI? They're pods already!"

Nancy: "Well, why not a 'space flower'? Why do we always expect metal ships?"
Jack: "I've never expected metal ships."

After Rosemary’s Baby, which, to me, is the best horror/suspense film ever made, I have to count Invasion of the Body Snatchers as one of the most consistently scary (and fun) thrillers I’ve ever seen. It delivers as drama, black comedy, sci-fi, and horror.  

Although set in a marvelously evoked '70s San Francisco, the film is so smart that it remains a relevant nightmare-inducer even after all these years.

Today, with all the pierced, body-inked, automatons walking around with their earbuds buried in their brains, eyes trained on texting fingers, with nary a moment of eye-contact or human interaction passed between them, we might be ripe for another remake. But I think we’d better hurry up. From what I’m seeing there’s not a lot of individuality left to be fearful of losing.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

NASHVILLE 1975

Nashville's unique title sequence recalls a popular style of 70s TV commercial for Greatest Hits record collections
70s K-Tel Record Commercial

A perhaps apocryphal story goes that Fox Television's insanely funny sitcom, Arrested Development was not more popular in the ratings and ultimately canceled because its rapid-fire jokes and almost subliminal sight-gags required viewers to actually pay attention. Whether true or not, it's a theory hard to dismiss when applied to the career of Robert Altman (a director a little over-represented on this blog, I know, but it's his fault, not mine. He was just too damned good). In a career as varied and immune to meeting expectations as Altman's, I don't think it's coincidence that his most straightforward, structurally conventional films—M*A*S*H, The Player, Popeye—have been his biggest hits, while his most intriguingly imaginative works have been critic's darlings but largely ignored by the populace at large.

Altman's fondness for multiple storylines, character-based films with large ensemble casts and overlapping dialogue just demanded a level of audience engagement that was rapidly going out of style with American moviegoers. (2001's Gosford Park, which fit the above criteria, was a huge success for Altman. An occurrence attributable to the fact that by then the 76-year-old director and his trademark style had grown as cozily familiar and commodified as Hitchcock's.) 

In 1975, American movie audiences - smarting from Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, and the Vietnam War - showed its first signs of wearying of Hollywood's "auteur" era and its films which strove to straddle the broad chasm of commercial and art. It took the blockbuster success of Jaws (released the same summer as Nashville) to unceremoniously put an end to America's brief love affair with "difficult" films that challenged and/or affronted; and audiences, speaking with their boxoffice dollars, made it known that they were in the mood to be reassured and comforted at the movies again. Whether it be with imaginative retreads of familiar genres of the past (Star Wars, Rocky) or remakes of past successes (A Star is Born, King Kong), America was just sick and tired of being asked to think and pay close attention at the movies all the time.

Ronee Blakley as Barbara Jean

Henry Gibson as Haven Hamilton

Lily Tomlin as Linnea Reese

Keith Carradine as Tom Frank

Karen Black as Connie White

Nashville, Robert Altman's kaleidoscopic vision of America as reflected through the interconnected stories of 24 characters over the course of 5 days in America's country music capital, was filmed in 1974, the year Richard Nixon resigned from the Presidency; and was released in 1975, one year before the U.S. Bicentennial—which also happened to be an election year.  

With one foot planted in an era of scandal and disillusionment, and the other poised on what could be the threshold of a renewed optimism and nationalistic stock-taking; Nashville (unquestionably one of the most timely films ever made) rather ambitiously set about giving the country an eyeful of itself. No one was expecting a red, white, & blue love letter from cinema's most acerbically cynical liberal, but Nashville's equating of politics with the phony, image-conscious flimflammery of show biz (the familist, piety-spouting, grassroots show biz of country music, at that) was a cautionary "Not so fast, America" hand raised to the nation's looming steamroller of ego-bolstering, rah-rah, Bicentennial back-slapping.

A constant visual and aural presence throughout Nashville is the campaign for fictional Presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker

The traffic jam that opens the film and the political rally that closes it are the only sequences that gather all the main characters of the film together in one site.

BBC journalist, Opal (Geraldine Chaplin)- " I need something like this for my documentary! I need it!
It's so...American! Those cars smashing into each other and all those mangled corpses...!"

In 1975, Opal's glaring incompetence and unsuitability for journalism was obvious. Today, she would probably be a member of a Los Angeles morning TV news broadcast, or a top reporter for TMZ.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Nashville may not be THE view of America, but it's most certainly A view of America, and like it or not, it's a vision that proves itself more prescient and relevant with each passing year. The first and best of Altman's films to use the multiple-plot format he would later employ in A Wedding, H.E.A.L.T.H., Short Cuts, Pret-a-Porter, and Gosford Park, Nashville is staggering in its deft handling of the myriad shifts in tone and changes in focus required of this genre. I can't think of another director capable of balancing such disparate elements in a free-flow mélange of comedy, drama, tragedy, and social satire.

Some of the more affecting story threads:

The monumentally untalented Suleen Gay (Gwen Welles) would most certainly be a contestant on "Nashville Star" or "American Idol" today. In an early draft of the Nashville screenplay, it was Suleen who would die at the end of the film (suicide).

Linnea (Tomlin in her Oscar-nominated film debut), the only Caucasian in an African-American gospel choir, sharing a family moment with her husband Delbert (Ned Beatty) and their two deaf children (Donna Denton and James Dan Calvert).

Runaway bride Albuquerque (Barbara Harris) and loner Kenny (David Hayward) commiserate on the road.

PERFORMANCES

Of all the terrific performances in Nashville, Karen Black as Country Western queen (and Barbara Jean rival) Connie White is my favorite. The goody-goody, over-coiffed prom queen look of so many country stars of the era —and typical of every female performer on The Lawrence Welk Show— has always seemed too calculatedly homespun to me, so I love that screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury envisions Connie White... all cotton candy hair and sweet as sugar smiles...as a steely, professional phony with a rapier-sharp competitive streak. Although her role is one of the briefest, the ever-resourceful Karen Black does some wonderful things with the smallest moments. She's hilarious but never less than spot-on authentic in every move she makes (check out how she avoids acknowledging the gift Barbara Jean's husband tries to give her). Watching her is like taking an actor's master class in bringing a character to life.

Connie White sizes up visiting movie star, Julie Christie (playing herself).
Connie, disbelieving Haven's assertion that Christie's actually a famous Oscar-winning star-  "She can't even comb her hair!"  A characteristically bitchy Connie White remark improvised by Karen Black

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The music in Nashville is so good and plentiful that it's a pity a full, complete soundtrack album has never been released. You don't have to be a fan of country music to enjoy the witty and sometimes surprisingly beautiful songs that play wall-to-wall throughout the film (many of which were composed and performed by the film's cast). In fact, so much of country music seems knowingly self-parodying that it's hard to tell the songs that are gently poking fun at the genre (like the self-serving moralizing of Haven Hamilton's "For the Sake of the Children") from the ones that sound like they could be the genuine article (Barbara Jean's rousing [but technologically dated] "Tapedeck in his Tractor").

Troubled married duo, Mary (Cristina Raines) and Bill (Allan Nicholls) perform "Since You've Gone." a superb song composed by actor Gary Busey that never made it onto the Nashville soundtrack album.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
When it comes to a film like Nashville, there can never be too much of a good thing. I can barely stand to dwell on the fact that some 16 hours of footage was originally shot and whittled down to 159 minutes. My only hope is that some company will make good on the long-promised DVD that will feature deleted scenes and omitted songs.

Opal, the easily distracted BBC journalist.
In a filmed sequence that didn't make it into the final cut, it was revealed that Opal is a fraud and was only posing as a journalist.

What I find fascinating about Nashville is that no matter to what degree the passage of time dates the fashions, furnishings, cars, and music, everything else about the film is disconcertingly up-to-date and of the moment.

I think it speaks well of the brilliance of everyone's work involved that you can extract any single character or situation and find a contemporary correlative. When I look at Nashville, it surprises me how much Altman's intimate style and respect for what is extraordinary in the ordinary person, anticipates today's fascination with reality TV. Similarly, the lure of pop stardom (Sueleen and Albuquerque) and the very American desire to re-invent oneself (Shelley Duvall's airheaded changeling, L.A. Joan, nee Martha) find their modern parallel in image-based celebrities like Lady Gaga and assembly-line superstar factories like "American Idol."

Without question, the most dispiriting evidence of Nashville's ahead-of-its-time/up-to-the-minute grasp of cultural zeitgeist is in its foreshadowing of an era where the line between celebrity and politics becomes inextricably blurred.  A time when the senselessness of assassination (a heinous but somehow socially assimilated atrocity due to its exclusive connection to political, religious, or ideological motives) spills over to include any public figure (John Lennon, tragically) so long as it serves to propel the assassin to worldwide notoriety. As we keep learning from TV and the Internet, each of us Americans has a God-given right to be famous. At any cost.

Haven- "This isn't Dallas! This is Nashville!"
As the political rally erupts in tragic violence, a wounded Haven Hamilton loses his toupee and his composure.

Nashville is a movie held in very high regard, yet it's one of those classic films that rarely airs on television. Which is odd, seeing how Altman's layered use of sound is tailor-made for today's advanced sound systems, and his eye for detail and full, busy frame compositions are perfect for all those super-sized  HDTVs. I sure would hate to think that this great film is so seldom screened because it just demands too much of our attention.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

I got these autographs from Tim (Keith Carradine) and Mary (Cristina Raines) back in 1979 when I was working at a Honda dealership in Los Angeles (hence the grease-stained paper given to Raines).

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011