Dana Wynter – Movie Musings

Paranoia in small-town America is superbly executed in Siegel’s creepy sci-fi thriller

Director: Don Siegel

Cast: Kevin McCarthy (Dr Miles Bennell), Dana Wynter (Becky Driscoll), King Donovan (Jack Belicec), Carolyn Jones (Teddy Belicec), Larry Gates (Dr Dan Kauffman), Virginia Christine (Wilma Lentz), Ralph Dumke (Police Chief Nick Grivett), Jean Wiles (Nurse Sally Withers), Bobby Clark (Jimmy Grimaldi)

‘Look, you fools, you’re in danger! Can’t you see?! They’re after you! They’re after all of us! Our wives, our children, everyone! They’re already here! You’re next!’

Those paranoid screams from Dr Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) are part of the iconic conclusion of Don Siegel’s thrilling B-movie sci-fi conspiracy, full of the creeping horror of not trusting your own eyes or ears. It’s set in small-town Santa Mira, a sweet-as-apple-pie slice of Americana, where everyone knows everyone and life never changes. Until, of course, it does. Dr Bennell returns from a conference in Los Angeles to an epidemic of people claiming their loved ones are no longer their loved ones but that something about them is different. Bennell shrugs this off, more focused on his budding romance with fellow divorcee Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) – until he finds a clone of his friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan) growing in their home and faces the horrific truth: alien invaders are replacing people in the town with emotionless duplicates bent on world domination.

Siegal always claimed it was just a movie. That he wasn’t interested in political statements. You can believe that if you like, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ power stems from the terrible political and social parallels it draws with the real-world. The inversion reeks of 50s McCarthyite paranoia at communist infiltration, those suspicious Pinkos uninterested in individuality, only in protecting the system, where people are just cogs in its wheel. Even today, it still feeds on our fear of ‘the system’ absorbing us, crushing all that individuality we pride ourselves in having.

Even scarier at the time, Invasion doesn’t happen in the big city (where individuals are all getting lost anyway), but in that most American place of all, sacred small-town America, of picket fences and lifelong neighbours. If it can happen there, Invasions suggests, it really could happen anywhere. It’s one of many instances where Siegel makes the low-budget work effectively: in the same way he made a massive city full of people you don’t know the perfect space for a killer in Dirty Harry, he makes an intimate community the worst possible place to see people drained of humanity.

Invasions of the Body Snatchers uses that low-budget and limited locations to excellent effect. The bulk of the action taking place in the character’s homes and offices is actually more chilling. Watching a pod person mow a lawn, while his terrified niece (an effective performance from Virginia Christie) swears up-and-down he’s definitely not really her uncle, or a child running in terror from the home of his preternaturally calm mother is even more scary. That gets even more disturbing when our heroes discover replicas of themselves growing in their basements, or watch their small-town streets suddenly turn into a sea of emotionless duplicates.

There is also a hell of a lot snuck under the censor’s watchful eyes (maybe they only half-watched B-movies?) Its sharp screenplay includes plenty of surprisingly racy talk about between Bennell and Becky about his ‘bedside manner’ (‘that comes later’ he wryly tells her), or the fact that both of these characters talk openly about ‘going to Reno’, a popular euphemism at the time for divorce. For the time this is a surprisingly frank discussion of sex, not to mention the possibility of contented divorce (even Bennell’s nurse teases him about his flirtations with married ladies). What’s interesting is to consider is, if part of the appeal of the film is the horror of the familiar disappearing, perhaps the open acceptance of both divorce and sex suggests the process is already happening in different ways? Perhaps the safe world of picket fences is collapsing anyway, into something more permissive (and, who knows, plenty of people might well prefer that).

The creepy body-horror of the pods the duplicates grow in is also surprisingly disturbing for a 50s sci-fi. Splitting open to reveal the half-formed people inside, covered in foam, or the creepily serene complete copies that emerge, there is something deeply unsettling about it. No wonder Bennell’s instinct is to destroy them if he can with a garden fork, a surprisingly graphic choice. It’s hard to imagine a major Hollywood picture getting away with this sort of nightmare imagery.

It helps to build the terror of the film, which grows more-and-more relentless. Much of the final third of Invasion mixes a cat-and-mouse game with Bennell and Becky’s desperate flight from the town. It culminates in Bennell – in a scene really sold by Kevin McCarthy, who is the picture of (literally) square-jawed determination and reasonableness – disintegrate into just the sort of ranting lunatic (as he would do again in a cameo in the 1978 remake) the pod people decide they can let go, because ‘no one will believe him anyway’. Siegel shoots this sequence of paranoid ranting with a fast-cut mix of close-up and unsettling angles, as Bennell fails utterly to get anyone on the highway to slow down and listen to his warnings, like that nightmare of shouting when no one can hear you.

Perhaps it was too much for the producers, who added their own reassurance, introducing a framing device where Bennell recounts his tale to two reassuring figures of authority. I like to think Siegel – who uses visual metaphors for creeping paranoia and panic effectively throughout the film – deliberately shot these sequences as dully as possible (they remind me above all of the pedestrian final sequence of The Magnificent Ambersons) either so that we forget them (which we do) or perhaps to suggest their mundane nature implies these two-dimensional doctors and FBI agents might just be pod people themselves.

Despite the framing device, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a tightly paced thriller, that builds in intensity throughout and uses its small-town setting as an excellent metaphor for the terrifying thought of your own family being invaded and subverted by a horrendous outside force. It makes for a compelling B-movie and leaves a deeply unsettling feeling behind: no wonder it has inspired so many remakes and reinventions. The terror of the people you know being the same and yet so completely alien and different, is going to have impact on every generation, no matter the context.

Disaster awaits in the sky in this ridiculous soap that is less exciting than Airplane!

Director: George Seaton

Cast: Burt Lancaster (Mel Bakersfied), Dean Martin (Captain Vernon Demerest), Jean Seberg (Tanya Livingston), Jacqueline Bisset (Gwen Meighen), George Kennedy (Joe Patroni), Helen Hayes (Ada Quonsett), Van Heflin (DO Guerrero), Maureen Stapleton (Inez Guerrero), Barry Nelson (Captain Anson Harris), Dana Wynter (Cindy Bakersfeld), Lloyd Nolan (Harry Standish), Barbara Hale (Sarah Demarest), Gary Collins (Cy Jordan)

A busy Chicago airport in the middle of a snowstorm. Workaholic Mel Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) doesn’t have time to prop up his failing marriage to his humourless wife: he’s got to keep the flights moving, clear the runways and solve the problems other people can’t. He’s not dissimilar to his brother-in-law Vernon Demerest (Dean Martin), who hasn’t got time for his plain-Jane wife at home when he’s got a flight to Rome to run and a saintly pregnant air hostess girlfriend Gwen (Jacqueline Bisset), to deal with. Tensions will come to a head when depressed former construction worker Guerrero (Van Heflin) joins Demerest’s flight, planning to blow himself up so his wife can profit from his life insurance. Disaster awaits!

“A piece of junk”. That was Burt Lancaster’s pithy review of this box-office smash that was garlanded with no fewer than ten Oscar nominations. He’s pretty much spot on. Airport is a dreadful picture, a puffed-up, wooden soap opera that never takes flight, stapled together with a brief disaster plotline that only really kicks in during the final act of the film and is solved with relative ease. Other than that, it’s all hands to the pumps to coat the film in soapy suds, which can be stirred up by the strips of wooden dialogue that fall from the actors’ mouths.

Seaton adapted the script from a popular low-brow novel, though it feels as if precious little effort went into it. It’s corny, predictable dialogue does very little to freshen up the bog-standard domestic drama we’re watching in a novel setting. Both lead actors juggle loveless marriages with far prettier (and much younger) girlfriends. Those girlfriends – Jean Seberg for Burt and Jacqueline Bisset for Dean – play thankless roles, happily accepting of their place as no more than a potential bit-on-the-side and very respectful of the fact that the job damn it is the most important thing.

The film bends over backwards so that we find Burt and Dean admirable, despite the fact that objectively their behaviour is awful. Burt treats his home like a stopover, barely sees his kids and seems affronted that his wife objects he doesn’t attend her important charity functions and doesn’t want the cushy job he’s being offered by her father. Just in case we sympathise with her, she’s a cold, frigid, mean and demanding shrew who – just to put the tin lid on it – is carrying on behind Burt’s back. We, meanwhile, applaud Burt for showing restraint around the besotted Jean Seberg, merely kissing, hugging and chatting with her about how he’d love to but he can’t because of the kids at home damn it!

He looks like a prince though compared to Dean. Only in the 1970s surely would we be expected to find it admirable that a pregnant girlfriend happily takes all the blame – the contraceptive pills made her fat and she knows the deal – begs her boyfriend not to leave his wife and then urges him to not worry about her. Dean’s wife doesn’t even seem that bad, other than the fact she’s a mumsy type who can’t hold a candle to Bisset’s sensuality. That sensuality is overpowering for Dean, who at one point pleads with her to stay in their hotel room because the taxi “can wait another 15 minutes”. Like a gentleman his reaction to finding out Bisset is pregnant, is to offer to fly her to Norway for a classy abortion (rather than the backstreet offerings at home?).

This soapy nonsense, with its stink of Mad Men-ish sexual politics (where men are hard-working, hard-playing types, and women accept that when they age out, he has the right to look elsewhere) is counterbalanced by some laboriously-pleased-with-itself looks at airport operations. Baggage handling. Customer check-in. Customs control checks. Airport maintenance. All get trotted through with a curious eye by Seaton. Just enough to make parts of the film feel briefly like a dull fly-on-the-wall drama rather than a turgid soap.

Soap is where its heart is though. Helen Hayes won an Oscar for a crowd-pleasing turn (from which she wrings the maximum amount of charm) as a seemingly sweet old woman who is in fact an expert stowaway. Van Heflin and Maureen Stapleton play with maximum commitment (Stapleton in particular goes for it as if this was an O’Neil play rather than trash) a married couple whose finances are in the doldrums, leading the husband to take drastic steps.

It’s all marshalled together with a personality-free lack of pizzaz by Seaton, who simply points the camera and lets the actors go through their paces, with a few shots of humour here and there. There are some interesting split-screen effects, but that’s about the last touch of invention in the piece. It’s mostly played with po-faced seriousness – something that feels almost impossible to take seriously today, seeing as the structure, tone and airport observational style of the film was spoofed so successfully in Airplane (a much better film than this on every single level, from humour, to drama even to tension – how damning is that, that a pisstake is a more exciting disaster thriller?)

It smashed the box office in 1970 and got nominated for Best Picture. But its dryness, dullness and lack of pace mean it has hardly been watched since. Although it can claim to be the first all-star disaster movie, it’s not even fit to lace the flippers of The Poseidon Adventure, which far more successfully kickstarted the cliches that would become standard for the genre (and is a tonne more fun as well as being a disaster movie – this has a disaster epilogue at best). An overlong, soapy, dull mess.