BEFORE: I snuck out to see "Blade Runner 2049" last night - I'm still processing what I saw. I'm going to need a few days to figure it all out, but since I'm right in the middle of the horror film chain, I'm not going to post my review now anyway. I've got a Ryan Gosling chain coming up in the first part of November, but I think I need to save "Blade Runner" for later on in November, as it represents the link between another Harrison Ford film and another film with Robin Wright. So that's the plan.
Richard Deacon carries over from "Them!", where he played a reporter, and if you don't know who Richard Deacon is, then you don't know your classic television. He's most famous for playing TV producer Mel Cooley, Rob Petrie's boss on "The Dick Van Dyke Show", and he also played Lumpy's father on "Leave it to Beaver". He had supporting roles in several Jerry Lewis films, too, like "The Patsy" and "The Disorderly Orderly", and I'm sure he had other acting roles too, but most people probably remember his work with Dick Van Dyke.
Tonight he plays a doctor or something, as the plant people try to take over once again - but this is the ORIGINAL version, so I suppose this was really the first time the plant people tried to take over.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1978) (Movie #1,203), "Body Snatchers" (Movie #2,186), "The Invasion" (Movie #2,479)
THE PLOT: A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.
AFTER: It took me a while to recognize where I'd seen the lead actor, Kevin McCarthy, before - sure, he had a cameo in the 1978 remake of "I.O.T.B.S.", but that wasn't it. In his later years, he played the mean old rich TV station owner in the Weird Al Yankovic comedy "UHF". That's probably why he seemed so familiar to me. Like Richard Deacon, he probably had a lot of other acting roles, but we all have our own frames of reference for these things.
Finally, a film that's a metaphor for Communism, right? People invading small town America with a different way of thinking, making everyone conform and work for the benefit of the collective, right? Trouble is, the film's director swore time and again that it wasn't about that, and he was just trying to make a scary movie. But the idea behind this film caught on, and I think the zeitgeist of 1950's paranoia gave it an additional, if unintended, meaning.
Those three German horror films I watched at the start of the month gave great insight into the fears of the German people in the 1930's - the worst thing would be to have one's fate controlled by a demon ("Faust") or a vampire ("Nosferatu") and have no say in the matter. To be a pawn in the game of life, subject to forces beyond one's control. Ah, the bitter angst of existentialism. But for Americans in the 1950's, perhaps the fear was quite different, that someone would come along with new ideas like Communism, or vegetarianism, or hippie Communist vegetarian, and change the minds of other people with the power of their ideas. Then, suddenly, those with the great American values of capitalism and meat-and-potato dinners would find themselves in the minority - the horror!
You still see it today, I don't have to draw much of a line to connect this fear of "the other" to today's apparent fears of immigrants and people of color, or men's fear of women's reproductive rights, or even fears of gay marriage or trans people serving in the military. It all comes from people fearing the things they don't understand - what if someone woke up one day and found their town full of people of a different race or sexual orientation, what would happen then? Well, probably nothing, but the fact is that white people are on their way to becoming the minority in the U.S., and deep down that probably scares the crap out of the more conservative ones. And I think we've all seen how certain people have been able to play upon those fears to get themselves elected, which almost doesn't seem fair.
A worse fear might be knowing, deep down, that something is very wrong with one's town, or country, then going out and sounding the alarm, only to have no one believe you, or to find out that you acted too late. That's what happens here to our main character, after he's called back from a medical convention to his home in Santa Mira. But when he returns, all seems well, and the people who were demanding to see him just a few days ago are suddenly feeling much better. Or are they? Certain people in town are swearing that not only is Uncle Ira not acting like himself, they feel like he might not really BE himself. And just as our hero starts to put the pieces together, finding a body here and a seed pod there, people try to convince him that everything's fine, it's just an outbreak of a little mass hysteria.
In the framing sequences, our everyman narrator is telling his story to the doctors in a mental hospital, and boy, I sure have seen my share of those this October! From the asylum run by Count Orlok in "Nosferatu" to the many incarnations of Renfield, always seen in the asylum run by Dr. Seward and/or Prof. Van Helsing, to the asylums frequented by Dr. Victor Frankenstein as he harvested body parts from their inmates...
The special effects here are also quite laughable, as with "The Thing From Another World", if you're looking for scary visuals you're better off watching the more modern remakes. And the music is horribly annoying as well, as my wife pointed out. She joined me for the latter half of this film, and I really should watch more movies with her, because she has a way of cutting to the quick when something seems ridiculous. She picked up on the 1950's vibe right away, since the man here made all the decisions, and his girlfriend was really just along for the ride. Outside of making a sandwich for him now and then, she really didn't serve much purpose - and in "The Thing From Another World", the two women on the Arctic base don't seem to do anything but make coffee for the men. Ah, good old sexism, going strong in 1956.
Also starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter (last seen in "Airport"), Larry Gates (last seen in "Some Came Running"), King Donovan (last seen in "The Caddy"), Carolyn Jones (last seen in "The Tender Trap"), Jean Willes, Ralph Dumke (last seen in "Artists and Models"), Virginia Christine, Tom Fadden, Kenneth Patterson (last seen in "Being There"), Guy Way (last seen in "How Sweet It Is!"), Eileen Stevens, Everett Glass (last seen in "The Thing From Another World"), Dabbs Greer (last seen in "Julius Caesar"), Sam Peckinpah, Whit Bissell (last seen in "Destination Tokyo"), Robert Osterloh (last seen in "The Wild One").
RATING: 5 out of 10 farm trucks
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