Veronica Cartwright can’t take any more in chilling remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, April 28, free with museum admission, 6:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
Based on a magazine serial by Jack Finney, Don Siegel’s 1956 classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was the ultimate thriller about cold war paranoia. Twenty-two years later, in a nation just beginning to come to grips with the failure of the Vietnam War, Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, Quills) remade the film, moving the location north to San Francisco from the original’s Los Angeles. When health inspector Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) and lab scientist Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) suspect that people, while they sleep, are being replaced by pod replicas, they have a hard time making anyone believe them, especially Dr. David Kibner (Leonary Nimoy), who takes the Freudian route instead. But when Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) seem to come up with some physical proof, things begin to get far more serious — and much more dangerous. Kaufman’s film is one of the best remakes ever made, paying proper homage to the original while standing up on its own, with an unforgettable ending (as well as an unforgettable dog). It cleverly captures the building selfishness of the late 1970s, which would lead directly into the Reagan era. As an added treat, the film includes a whole bunch of cameos, including Siegel as a taxi driver, Robert Duvall as a priest, and Kevin McCarthy, who starred as Dr. Miles Bennell in the original, still on the run, trying desperately to make someone believe him. The sc-fi thriller is screening at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the institution’s See It Big! series and will be introduced by Columbia professor and author Annette Insdorf, who will also be signing copies of her latest book, Contemporary Film Directors: Philip Kaufman (University of Illinois Press, March 2012, $22).