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I've always found it to be a bit of a mystery that Don Siegel's original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is ranked so prominently on my Flickchart.
To be sure, it was a movie I knew was great, in addition to being seminal, the moment I saw it, which I would guess was sometime in my early- to mid-20s. But a personal favorite? Its ranking as #151 on my Flickchart certainly seems to suggest it should be. There are a lot of movies I've seen five, six, seven times that are ranked below it.
But one truth about Flickchart is that a movie is only as good as the duels it's had. Sure there was a ground zero when I first added Invasion of the Body Snatchers to my chart, when it beat a lot of stalwarts to land where it landed. I must have been feeling pretty favorably toward it that day, though it was not the day I saw it, since, as I said, that was sometime in the late 1990s (I'm guessing), and Flickchart has only existed since 2009.
It would have held that spot, though, if it never randomly came up against any movies in the next 100 that I might like better. It's conceivable that this movie -- that any movie ranked a little too high on my chart -- might have only had "slam dunk duels." In other words, either it faces a top 100 movie, where it loses but does not lose any ground in the overall rankings, or it faces a movie outside my top 500, and is an obvious winner. I'm guessing that if Invasion of the Body Snatchers ever came up against my #178 -- I just chose that number randomly, but it happens to be Romancing the Stone -- then it might lose, and enough such losses would drive it steadily downward to a more appropriate spot. And yes, I'm pretty sure Romancing the Stone, specifically, would win that particular duel.
One indication that it is not a personal favorite should be that I've never seen it fit to watch it again. Yes for sure I am less likely to rewatch black and white films -- especially nowadays, when there are barely any streamers that carry them -- but this one in particular would have been an easy watch. It's only 80 minutes long, and it contains almost zero fat, meaning it feels more like an hour than an hour 20.
And that's really the first thing I want to talk about here: how frigging efficient this script is. No fuss, no muss. Every single occurrence on screen contributes to the thrust toward the inevitable, with nary a wasted moment. It gives the film an extraordinary momentum. In fact, I was even thinking that this could be a great black and white entry point for my kids, considering that I don't think they've ever seen a full-length black and white film. They saw The Wizard of Oz, but that's only about a third black and white. So maybe my third Invasion of the Body Snatchers viewing will come a lot sooner than the second.
So yeah, there was no time to get bored, and this flew by in the darkening, daylight savings hours of a Sunday late afternoon.
We all know the story here. It's a chilling parable about conformity, and specifically about McCarthyism. I don't need to delve into the themes. You've seen this subject matter reinterpreted multiple times, such as the also superlative 1978 version with the famous final shot of Donald Sutherland pointing. These Audient One-Timer posts are not about delving deep into the film itself.
So there are only two other things I want to write about it today:
1) I don't want to spoil an entertainment property you didn't even know I might be talking about today, so I'm going to be vague here. But it struck me, as I was watching, that one of the most popular new TV shows from the last year is essentially a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I didn't think about that as I was watching that show, but when watching IOTBS, all I could think about was the show. It's funny that I didn't actually hear pod people evoked in any of the discourse around that show. The Borg from Star Trek was a more common reference point. I'm sure those comparisons are out there on the internet if I wanted to search for them.
2) Although I find the rules to be generally as complete as needed to establish the chilling ideas we see here, there was one nitpick I had on this viewing that isn't sitting right with me. Okay so we know that one of the keys of replacing these people with pod versions of themselves is that an actual physical replacement has to be grown in a seed pod, a process that is faster than you might expect but still takes some time. What happens with Kevin McCarthy's love interest, played by Dana Wynter, is a bit problematic, then. Although we know these replacements occur while the person is sleeping, they do actually involve a physical swap-out of new organic material with the same weight, size and mass. So how is it that Becky Driscoll, unable to fight sleep any longer, dozes off for five seconds, and awakens as a pod person? Where is the seed pod that needs to be next to her body in order to assume her identity?
The internet likely also has an explanation for this one, but I'm not going to go looking for it.
My May movie will be ... well I've just realized I've made a grievous error.
I created a Letterboxd listing for the top 15 movies I'd seen only once on my Flickchart, since I might have to go beyond 12 if I can't source one of the top 12. I thought I'd put them in that order in the list. But when checking now, I can see that I somehow skipped over the great Hitler movie Downfall, my #171 on Flickchart. It should have come up in March after I'd watched Smoke Signals (#181) and Solars (#176). Instead I went straight ahead to Rain Man (#158). So obviously this means Smoke Signals was my #13 and should never have been included.
There's no doubt that the eight films I have left in this series are all ranked higher than Downfall, so either I skip Downfall or I extend the series to a 13th month. Or I could just double up one month.
If I do double up, May will include both Downfall and my #141, Judgment at Nuremberg. If not, just the latter. But the felicitous thematic relationship between those two films makes it seem like a double feature would be just about the perfect solution. Who knows, maybe I'll even try to watch them on the same day.
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