“INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS”: I watched this last night at the American City Diner (great location, by the way–I’d been very apprehensive, figuring the place would be crowded, noisy, etc., but the movie deck was pleasant, people were few and quiet, and the food was quite good and fairly cheap–dinner and a movie for ten bucks is pretty awesome).

The movie was brisk and tense, though not especially terrific. What interested me most was that I’d always heard IOTBS described as an allegory of McCarthyism, and yet as I was watching I kept thinking that it would make at least as good an allegory for Communism. A quick Google browse found that apparently I’m not alone in this belief; but I had only ever heard of IOTBS as an anti-McCarthy movie, never as an anti-Communist (or “pox on both your houses,” a la the excellent “Manchurian Candidate”) movie.

SPOILERS AHEAD… but not particularly spoil-y ones.

Signs that the pod people are McCarthyites: All the normal, trusted people of the town are pods. Especially the police. From the very beginning, the cops are not to be trusted.

The pods are described as “callous” and “all the same”–standard slams on conservatives, though also applicable to Communists.

They’re everywhere, not just in isolated little cells.

They don’t have ideology, just the will to survive.

You don’t make a decision to become a pod–you just “fall asleep.”

The hero and heroine are both divorcees… but I would be more inclined to see that as an implied critique of sexual mores if a) their romance were treated in anything like a realistic fashion, for example, if it were implied that they had learned empathy through their broken marriages; or b) more importantly as far as film interpretation goes, if anyone in the town seemed to find their divorces scandalous or somehow improper. But nobody mentions it except the two characters themselves, and then only very briefly.

Signs that the pods are Commies: The hero does trust the FBI, and the pods work to prevent him from contacting the bureau.

Hero: “We have to find them all–and destroy them! We’ll look in every house!” And under every bed?

The pods’ takeover is directed, organized, not spontaneous.

Non-pod people are just skeptical of the hero’s unbelievable claims. They’re not hostile to him, they just think he’s touched in the head. They view him as a paranoiac.

The “love and singing vs. repressive conformity” storyline echoes 1984.

A pod describes himself, and all the other pods, as “without desire or ambition or faith.” Sounds much more like godless, egalitarian Communism than like Tailgunner Joe and his followers.

The pods are foreign (from space, i.e. Russia?), and from the sky (utopia??).

Anyway, the movie is suspenseful on its own terms, but since I yam what I yam, I found it was made all the more fascinating because it didn’t conform to my expectations of an anti-anti-Communist fable. I wonder if Whittaker Chambers saw it. (Chambers testifed before HUAC in 1948; published Witness in 1952; and died in 1961. IOTBS was released in 1956.)

Oh, and the epilogue really is not as good as the original ending. If you watch it I think it’ll be easy to see where it ended originally, but that ending was apparently considered too depressing by the studio. In general I oppose the contemporary distaste for happy endings, but in many particular cases a happy ending just isn’t as powerful.