Is this a fallen Eve bringing corruption and possession to the garden of Eden – the booming and innocent America of Norman Rockwell? That Becky Driscoll returns to the goodness of small-town America from some ‘other’ place under the ‘stigma’ of divorce is probably no coincidence, in the moral etymology of both book and film. Bennell and Dana Wynter as Becky Driscoll, Siegel’s vision followed Finney’s with uncommon fidelity until the ending, where the half-insane McCarthy finally manages to persuade the doctors and policeman who are about to have him committed that his story is true: one of the trucks carrying the alien pods out to new towns and cities has been involved in a road accident, and a ‘clean’ police-officer has reported ‘the strangest plants I ever saw’.īut it is the preceding scene – of McCarthy madly trying to flag down cars on a motorway and warn their inhabitants of the pending alien menace – that is the hallmark horror of Siegel’s version, and the leitmotif of all versions since: the lone voice of truth in an unbelieving world, fleeing the lies and easy conceit of a common enemy. Fighting back with gasoline fires and determined to defy their aggressors/possessors until the bitter end, the invaders finally decide that the spirit of the human race is too indomitably allied to concepts of independence and free-will to be worth the struggle of invasion, and the pods fly back up into space…for the time being.Ģ: Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)The rapidly-acquired rights to Finney’s novel bore the first screen adaptation in very short order under the helm of long-time Clint Eastwood collaborator Don Siegel.
Soon the doctor and Becky are outnumbered by the pod-people of Santa Mira, hunted down into the outlying country.
The ‘possessed’ explain to the pair that life after their ‘absorption’ will be free of war, pain…and love, and offer their take on a better existence under the concept of a common mind and goal. It is established that sleep represents the moment of possession, the transference of being between the inhabitants of Santa Mira and the itinerant space-borne pods that have settled around the town, and survival is a struggle to stay awake at all costs. Only when Bennell’s friend Jack Belicec presents the incredulous doctor with a full-size version of himself growing like a newly forming template on his own billiard table does Bennell understand that there is something substantial behind the mania, and that Santa Mira’s population is being taken over by some terrible replicating force capable of absolute mimicry and total dissolution of the original spirit of the host.
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