Why Richard Donner’s Superman Still Reigns Supreme

If film critics have their own hell, one circle of it must surely be devoted entirely to comic book movies. That’s the circle where they will inevitably put me, where I’ll be forced to watch every superhero movie on a loop for eternity. Like that train circling the earth continuously in Snowpiercer, I will slowly become conditioned to the mindlessness of it, and be overly grateful when, once a year, Superman comes around to provide a 2-hour reprieve from my cinematic exhaustion.

People criticize the 1978 Superman for its cheesy special effects (a mostly valid claim) and its decidedly square sensibility about the world (also valid). I often hear fans of superhero movies sniffing that they prefer the “dark” subject matter of those Christopher Nolan Batman movies (or just the darker sensibilities of Batman as a character) to the America-loving, endlessly optimistic Boy Scout that is Superman.

I counter these arguments by reminding all of you that in 1978, American cinema was capable of magnificent bouts of cynicism, and that a dark Superman would have been strangely out of place, since Superman is, ultimately, depicted as a Savior, the Ubermensch sent here to redeem us from our own moral failings. The weirdly out of place Superman fits into this time frame in the culture: We were still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate and so many internal conflicts, and American movies had grown up right along with all those issues. Superman feels refreshing; it’s as innocent as E.T., although perhaps not as insightful.

Superman’s insights are too manufactured, and they set the tone for every other movie about a young hero who is marked by specialness and set apart to defeat some all-powerful villain. But with Superman, the distinction actually registers. He’s actually better than you and me. (Today’s movies don’t know how to depict specialness. They turn their heroes into the dullest, most depressed characters in the movie.)

But despite is corny values, Richard Donner’s Superman captures a sense of wonder about the mysteries of the universe. 90% of that power comes, I’m sure, from the swelling, emotionally charged score by John Williams. Superman is always bowled over by the myth it’s trying to tell. It’s that love of storytelling, the way that Superman is enchanted with its own mythology, that is contagious: When I watch this movie, I’m pulled in too, suckered in every time like some schmuck at a used car lot. When Superman rescues Lois Lane as she tumbles out of a helicopter, my heart skips a beat. When he takes her on a ride through the night sky and she delivers that horrible narration of freeform poetry, I want to vomit, but I don’t hold it against the movie. “It’s not your fault, dear,” I say, “and I still love you.”

Lois Lane, meanwhile, is beautifully fleshed out by Margot Kidder, who’s a perfect foil for Christopher Reeve, who embodies that Boy Scout, G-rated veneer he represents as the Man of Steel. Kidder is tough and quick-witted, a women’s lib version of the women reporters like Rosalind Russell played in 1940s comedies. But she’s got those dazzling eyes that are capable of suspending that cheeky modern cynicism long enough to be swept off her feet by an old-fashioned boy from Kansas (or Krypton). She has a knack for mixing contempt with pity and sugar with sweetness.

But the best thing about Superman is the villain, Lex Luthor, played with absolute relish by Gene Hackman. I know it’s probably naïve to read a fun performance as surefire proof that an actor was having a good time on the set, but that’s exactly what I think when I see Hackman’s performance as the mastermind Luthor, whose mental powers and finesse cannot compensate for his incompetent staff (chiefly the beloved Ned Beatty as Otis, Luthor’s bumbling right-hand-man). Lex Luthor admires Superman for his goodness while simultaneously mocking him for it, and more importantly, taking advantage of it. While Superman approaches every crisis with an almost heavy-handed seriousness, Luthor maintains a happy “who-gives-a-shit” attitude. Movies today seldom even try to accomplish this kind of lightness. We’re too obsessed with villains who are supposed to be deadly serious mocking heroes for being deadly serious.

We often mistake the seriousness of our heroes and villains for depth, when really there’s nothing there but the absence of real feeling and complexity. Depth is not always a good thing, especially if it’s a deep, dark morass. Superman is rich in feeling and lightness and majesty. It doesn’t weigh us down with heaviness: it lifts us up with a humane view of the world, of reaching for kindness even when it’s impossible to obtain. And yes, that does mean that Superman rates higher on the cheese factor than Batman. But how can you not respond to this movie’s world-view and feel truly lifted: Jor-El (played by a somber, stoic Marlon Brando) leaves his son with these words about the people of Earth: “They can be a great people, if they wish to be. For this reason, for their capacity for good, I have sent them to you: my only son.” Chills.

Interiors

Interiors (1978) feels like Woody Allen wanting us to take him seriously, as though making groundbreaking comedies wasn’t good enough. It’s an incredibly conscientious film, shot with skill by Gordon Willis and laden with somber qualities, but it’s also incredibly underwhelming. And not even that original. The problems of the characters have been explored in Allen’s films for his entire career: artistic frustration, fear of commitment, fear of death, etc. Allen has always managed to steal from himself. Some critics would argue that he’s developing several themes over the course of his long career; and if you watch an older Allen film out of context with the rest of his body of work--as I have done, seeing them in a fairly haphazard fashion, starting with, I think, 1993’s Manhattan Murder Mystery and basically working backwards--you do get an unfair advantage. I was, for instance, comparing the three sisters of Interiors (played by Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, and Kristin Griffith) to the three sisters of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and I kept thinking that Allen had done better with his material in that considerably lighter movie.

My mind also drifted to the comparably recent Cassandra’s Dream (2007), another of Woody Allen’s serious pieces, which I detest. Some people adore his dramas, and that’s fine. Allen obviously wants to remind us that he’s scene Bergman’s films, that he’s a well-rounded cinephile, but it’s this need to prove himself that makes Interiors so disengaging. The icy Wasp-mother, played to a kind of heartless, horrifying perfection by Geraldine Page, is so awful that it’s a relief when she drowns herself at the end, except that we know she died a martyr in her own mind. If her neglected daughter Joey (Hurt) can experience some kind of relief in the death of her unfeeling, self-involved mother, it seems somehow trite that Allen turns the event into a device, allowing Joey, the middle sibling who could never express herself like her older sister Renata, the writer (Keaton) or her gorgeous younger sister Flyn, the actress (Griffith), to finally create something fulfilling: a diary. (I must confess I’m guessing on the birth order here; I don’t know that the film makes it very clear, except that Flyn is obviously the youngest.)

With E.G. Marshall as the doctor-father who leaves his wife after 30-plus years of marriage, Maureen Stapleton as the new woman in his life (who has some good moments, the only real air in the whole movie), Sam Waterston, and Richard Jordan.

The Fury

Of all the thrillers Brian De Palma made in the 70s and early 80s, The Fury holds the record for being the wackiest. Its loosey-goosey story involves youths with telepathy who are targeted by a secret government agency. The Fury has a terrific music score by John Williams. Williams’s music elevates the supreme goofiness of De Palma’s movie. (It was right around the time he was composing scores for Star Wars and Superman, and the influence is obvious, although the music is still distinct. It’s beautiful, emotionally big and evocative, and compelling.)

Kirk Douglas plays Peter Sandza, an ex-CIA agent whose son Robin (Andrew Stevens) has psychic abilities that the government wants to harness. So, they kidnap Robin after attempting to kill his dad while the two of them are vacationing somewhere in the Middle East. Then the film jumps a year ahead, to Chicago, where Amy Irving is strolling along Lake Michigan with her girlfriend, studying for an upcoming test. Irving’s character, Gillian, has the same kind of psychic powers as Robin, and a man—also possessive of these abilities—has procured her for the desperate Peter, who’s hoping Gillian can help him track down his son. 

Robin, it turns out, is being held by the afore-mentioned ominous government agency, pacified by a sexy psychiatrist (Fiona Lewis) while the government tries to exploit him. Gillian makes several psychic connections with Robin when she goes to stay at the Chicago-based Paragon Institute, a facility that reaches out to people with these kinds of gifts. It’s run by two apparently sincere scientists played by Charles Durning and Carol Rossen, who know Robin because he stayed there once too (briefly).

The government learns of Gillian’s powers just as Peter does, so that it becomes a race to see who can get to her first, and whether or not Peter can track down his son and rescue him from the manipulative clutches of the powers-that-be.

I took the time of explaining the oddball plot of The Fury to point out that Brian De Palma, perhaps more than any director working in his genre in the 1970s, was a filmmaker committed to a kind of madcap expressionism. The movie glides along to that wonderful John Williams score, soaking in the sights of Chicago, humming along with all its bizarre plot points, and as illogical, incredulous and half-baked as much of it is, the thing is a hell of an experience. It’s not as iconic as Carrie, nor as freaky as Dressed to Kill, but it’s alive with energy, and De Palma pulls sincere performances out of everyone in the cast. The movie falls apart in the end, but fans of such genre-tripping nuttiness should definitely give this freak-out of a horror film a try. It's wonderfully cynical and made with an exuberant love of the genre. There are also some bonkers special effects—especially at the end—featuring bodily explosions. (These youths have a lot of pent-up energy.)

With Carrie Snodgress, John Cassavetes, Joyce Easton, Rutanya Alda, and, in bit parts, Darryl Hannah and Dennis Franz. Screenplay by John Farris (adapted from his novel).  

Superman

Generally, comic book movies are insufferable. Superman (1978) is an exception. Despite its bad special effects, which were dated even in 1978, and its cornball, rah-rah-America attitude, Superman works. It's enormous fun. You never take Superman too seriously, even when he proclaims his motto about fighting for "truth, justice, and the American way." Christopher Reeve plays him just a little tongue-in-cheek: he doesn't enshrine his character with self-importance. And it's hard to find a more entertaining villain than Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, who may be evil but at least manages to be funny and colorful at the same time, especially when he's insulting his flunky, Otis (Ned Beatty), a delightfully bumbling underling, or condescending to his bosomy assistant Miss Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine). Hackman looks like he's having a ball as the criminal mastermind, and his digs are quite impressive: he lives under the subway in some kind of subterranean palatial apartment. Luthor is buying up a bunch of worthless desert land along the San Adreas fault, and once he causes a massive earthquake that knocks the good half of California into the ocean, his crummy real estate will be worth a fortune.

Of course the whole Superman idea is a bit corny: He's the nearly-perfect superhero, not complicated by internal struggles or morality the way Batman or other superheroes are. The original Superman comic book (created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) debuted during the Depression when it was conceivable that kids needed a role model who was impervious to everything, including hunger pangs and the moral corruption that tends to accompany extreme poverty and want. In the 1970s, the appeal of Superman was to moral corruption and decay at a higher level: A post-Vietnam and post-Watergate America must have seemed like fertile enough ground in which to plant this superhuman boy scout with a red cape and goofy tights. The writers of Superman (there were quite a few of them: Mario Puzo of The Godfather, David and Leslie Newman, Robert Benton, and Tom Mankiewicz) must have sensed that they needed their superhero to be mildly funny and self-aware to balance the goody-goody image. And yet Superman is never self-effacing. In that way, the movie gives us a good time without being ashamed of itself.

With Marlon Brando as Superman's father, Jorel, the stoic intellectual of the planet Krypton, who foresees his people's imminent doom and sends his infant son off to earth in a weird little vessel with pointy crystals protruding from every which way; Margot Kidder as plucky Lois Lane, the reporter who works for the Daily Planet and steals Superman's heart; Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter as Superman's earth parents; Jackie Cooper as the editor of the Planet; Marc McClure as Jimmy, photographer for the Planet; Jeff East as the teenage Clark Kent/Superman; Susannah York as Superman's real mother; and in small parts that serve as a setup for the sequel, Terrence Stamp, Sarah Douglas, and Jack O'Halloran as three Kryptonian criminals sentenced to eternal imprisonment in a glass, square prism that forever hurdles through space.

Music score by John Williams. Cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth. 154 min. ★★★½ 

An Unmarried Woman

An Unmarried Woman (1978) is a portrait of middle-aged Erica Benton (Jill Clayburgh), recently divorced from her husband of sixteen years (he fell in love with another woman), and discovering what it means to be single again after identifying herself by her marital status for so long. It's an interesting, in-depth movie, and a sort of serious, cinematic version of what was being done in The Mary Tyler Moore Show in that same decade.

There's a scene where Erica and her three girlfriends are talking about famous movie actresses, wondering what ever happened to Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, and lamenting the loss of such great female stars, replaced--this is the late 70's--by such actresses as Jane Fonda and Barbra Streissand, both fine actresses, playing liberated women, but somehow not as memorable or as powerful as the role models these girls grew up with.

It's ironic that Bette Davis and company dominated the screen in the 1930s and 40s more so than their male counterparts, while the post-feminist 1970s witnessed a drying up of good roles for women. Clayburgh's performance in this film is a high point of the decade: she approaches her character with wit and charm and realism. The writer-director, Paul Mazursky, manages to be sympathetic to Erica without wallowing in her misery, and the film, which of course looks very 70s now, is still surprisingly relevant, and charming too. The second half loses a bit of the humorous bite of the first, but in the trade-off we get to see Erica develop a relationship with a gruff, passionate British artist, played by Alan Bates, in an attempt to restart her life.

Mazursky's direction mostly avoids the sentimental made-for-television-esque tropes that marked a lot of these 1970s dramas (although there's a scene where Erica is ice skating that feels a bit too A Woman Renewed: The Erica Benton Story). He's got a lot of clever ideas, but more importantly, he lets his characters develop in what seems a natural way. There's also an eye for visuals that makes the film interesting, even as simple as an angled shot of the four girlfriends sitting next to each other at a bar. They almost look like they're sitting together on stairsteps. For some reason, it works much better than if the camera had been staring at them directly, evenly.

With Michael Murphy (as Martin, Erica's husband), Cliff Gorman, Patricia Quinn, Kelly Bishop, Lisa Lucas (as Patti, Erica's daughter), Linda Miller, Penelope Russianoff, and Novella Nelson. ★★★

Halloween

John Carpenter's films between Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Christine (1983) were supreme examples of how atmosphere can make a movie, and how it can compensate for other less successful attributes. Halloween (1978) is the apex of Carpenter's early career (and ultimately, of all time), full of cinematographer Dean Cundey's ominous tracking shots, and lots of creepy blue lighting, plus Carpenter's chilling--if redundant--score, reminiscent of Mike Oldfield's eerie Exorcist tune.

The story of Halloween is about as simplistic as it gets: a maniac escapes from a mental institute and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, which was the scene of his first crime 15 years earlier when he stabbed his teenage sister to death. For reasons unknown, he goes after three teenage girls: Jamie Lee Curtis, making her film debut, is the most resourceful among them, and P.J. Soles and Nancy Loomis play her friends, who are too busy with their boyfriends to be aware of the masked killer lurking around the corner.

A lot of Halloween is delayed gratification: Carpenter keeps you waiting for the bogeyman to strike, but often times he doesn't. His patience is almost miraculous, except for his horrible intentions. But why is he so patient? And why does he continually let Laurie (Curtis) out of his grasp? Perhaps he's playing a game with her, but because he's supposed to represent evil incarnate, the script--by Carpenter and producer Debra Hill--doesn't try to explain him, or his motivations.

Donald Pleasence classes things up as the obsessive psychiatrist Dr. Loomis, who tried to rehabilitate the child murderer for 15 years, obviously unsuccessfully. He follows the killer--named Michael Myers--to Haddonfield, convinced something bad is going to happen. Pleasence was well-known for playing villains and heels (such as Blofeld in the Bond picture You Only Live Twice). Halloween revived and redirected his career, inaugurating him as the prototype for all the old farts who permeated slasher films in the 1980s. (He's just the slasher era's Van Helsing, really. Wiser than the stupid teenagers, and cunning enough to rival the killer.)

While Halloween isn't a perfect picture, it still ranks as the best of its ilk (with the original Black Christmas just behind it). I can't think of a better "slasher" film, although it's hard to really put it in the same category as the movies it inspired (such as Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream). It's not all that violent, and there's almost no blood. Carpenter tries to rely on suspense to make you jump. And while he's not as sophisticated as he's been credited, Carpenter achieves the quality of a Hollywood nightmare: something controlled and very deliberate, but enjoyable when you're able to watch it at work, hitting all the right marks. It's the ultimate popcorn horror flick.

With Charles Cyphers, Nick Castle as The Shape (although it's not his face you see when Laurie briefly unmasks him, but Tony Moran's), Kyle Richards, and Brian Andrews. Followed by seven (!) sequels. Avoid the wretched remake.

Days of Heaven

--> I once loaned my copy of Days of Heaven (1978) to some friends, and when they returned it, one of them dubbed it, “the movie that wouldn’t end.” Indeed, a Terrence Malick hour-and-a-half feels much longer than a Francis Ford Coppola three-hours, because, for all its beautiful imagery, Days of Heaven is a bore. People who talk favorably about it never mention the plot, because Malick, the writer-director, doesn’t care very much about plot: instead, supporters of Malick’s work talk rapturously about its rich, Academy Award-winning cinematography (by Nestor Almendros). It’s a simple love triangle-story, set in Texas (but filmed in Alberta), in which an opportunistic drifter (Richard Gere) pairs off his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) with a shy sharecropper (Sam Shepard) who’s got less than a year to live. 

The story isn’t bad, but Malick wants the nature imagery to envelop it (and us). He enjoys de-emphasizing human stories in favor of natural imagery. (He's almost righteously anti-plot, which may explain why he uses such a tired one. We’ve already seen it before, and Malick prefers that we fill in all the gaps for ourselves, with bits of dialogue and parts of other movies we’ve seen. That way Malick can focus on art.) Like 2011’s The Tree of Life, Days of Heaven isn’t terrible, necessarily, and there are certain images that remain in your head, particularly the scene where locusts invade the wheat fields. But it all boils down to something pretentiously antithetical to the enjoyment of movies, as much as it tries for some kind of vapid “pure cinema” look and feel. The worst part is that so many people have been fooled into thinking it's great cinema. It's technically well-made, but it's difficult to respond to the characters when they feel so muted, so undernourished, as though their own creator had nothing but contempt--or worse, disinterest, which grows out of contempt--for them. Linda Manz plays Gere’s kid-sister, who narrates the film with her distractingly ugly New York accent. Malick wants her childish observations to sound philosophical, but they’re really just cant. 

Note: the picture that has long adorned the title page of this blog was from Days of Heaven. Now that I've reviewed the movie, I think I'm going to retire it. See if you can identify the next one.

Martin

This flaky little vampire film, released in 1978, looks at the vampire myth through modern eyes. Seventeen-year-old misfit Martin (John Amplas) goes to live with his elderly cousin (Lincoln Maazel) in a suburb of Pittsburgh. The cousin still holds to his Old World beliefs about family curses and evil omens, and believes that Martin is actually an 84-year-old vampire. Martin, meanwhile, insists that he's not, that all the lore about vampires is the stuff of movies. There's no real magic, Martin assures us. We're never sure who to believe.

We've already been predisposed to be afraid of Martin, for in the beginning of the movie, we witness the brutal slaying of a woman on a train. (It's worth noting that a train brings Martin to his next hunting ground, and in Dracula the train was a symbol of progress, but one that also linked the up-to-date-with-a-vengeance London to the steeped-in-superstition Transylvania. It's a fun, subtle commentary on what technological advances can bring in the way of horrors.) But unlike Dracula, Martin doesn't have fangs, so he uses a razor blade (after drugging his victim so she won't put up a fight).

Romero had made several unsuccessful films prior to Martin (including 1973's The Crazies), and Martin seems like a culmination of them all: he's taken the most interesting pieces of ideas he had been experimenting with before (alienation in suburbia, the difference between the mythology and the reality of the supernatural, and the breakdown of systems--economic, class, theological, familial, racial, etc.) and funneled them into this oddball shocker. It's compact though, and despite its flaws, it's quite striking. Romero is a master editor: his style is quick and throws a lot of business at you, but all of it feels meticulously organized; it's always cumulative, never haphazard.  

That Martin should come to live in such a dead city as Braddock (which is a borough of Pittsburgh) is apropos. The film documents on a small scale what must have been the sheer exhaustion of the country, and the collapse under the weight not only of failed economic policies, but the failed promises of industry. There's a looming sense of decay throughout Martin: it's a cultural decline that this film has captured, a sort of apocalyptic banality that swept the nation post-Civil Rights, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate. If Night of the Living Dead tapped into the vein of that turbulent era of the 1960s, Martin is here to witness the drying up of it. It seems to be asking the question: are vampires a product of economics, or of superstition? All the old systems are still in place, but they have no power ultimately. Romero dances around with all these ideas and images, content to ask a lot of questions and offer no answers. (There are even black-and-white flashbacks of Martin being pursued by a mob with flaming torches and stakes, but are these memories of antiquity, or psychotic hallucinations?)

The acting in Martin is often over-the-top, but the movie is so surreal and subdued that it works for it. Maazel chews the scenery, and it may be his performance that inspired the goofy Van Helsing impression Mel Brooks did in Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Amplas is like a mixture of Jackie Earle Haley and Ed Wood: he's got a creepy boyishness mixed with a hammy stage persona, but it too works for the movie. Martin is always equal parts sinister and sympathetic.

With Christine Forrest (Romero's long-time wife), Tom Savini (the make-up artist, who went on to become a kind of cult figure in his industry), Elyane Nadeau, and, in a cameo, Romero himself, as an apathetic young priest. The weird music score is by Donald Rubinstein.

Foul Play

For most of my childhood, Foul Play (1978) was my favorite comedy (or at the very least, tied with Nine to Five--which, incidentally, was directed by the same man, Colin Higgins). It's about a shy but sexy librarian (Goldie Hawn) who becomes mixed up in a murder plot involving an odd assortment of criminals who are planning to assassinate the pope when he visits San Francisco. The movie is basically a remake of Charade, where Audrey Hepburn plays the chic widow pursued by a trio of cads in Paris and a mysterious stranger, played by Cary Grant. It evens mimics Charade in at least one scene where Goldie is running from one of her attackers. The camera zooms in on her legs and her black high heels as she runs for her life.

Goldie Hawn seems to have access to a neverending current of charm, and she's consistently engaging in almost every movie I've seen her in. While Foul Play may be one of the fluffier entries into her career, it's nonetheless a fun movie, provided you don't put too much thought into it. The comedy is best when Goldie is resourceful but wide-eyed, and her co-star, Chevy Chase, doesn't have to fake Cary Grant-ish charm. Chevy's strength is in his bumbling inability to be serious, and as long as he doesn't have to be a legitimate romantic lead, you can enjoy his being ostensibly paired off with Hawn. He plays a cop who Goldie meets at a party, and then becomes involved with her after responding to her frantic call to the police during an attack by a creepy thug (Don Calfa).

Several comic set pieces are utterly contrived. A scene with Billy Barty is a complete waste, manufactured by the confusion of the head criminal's nickname, "The Dwarf." There's a whole sequence involving Dudley Moore that doesn't fit into the movie at all. Moore is funny regardless, playing a kinky swinger who gets the wrong idea when Goldie asks him to take her home. She's running from a killer, but somehow convinces Moore that she's looking for a one-night-stand.

Hawn's character seems anachronistic to San Francisco. She's apparently the first modern American woman to be de-liberated by a divorce: it's turned her into a mousy loner who has shut herself off to the prospect of romance. It's hard to accept, because Goldie Hawn exudes an effulgent likableness that is anything but shy or unappealing.

And San Francisco isn't exactly portrayed in a good light: it's shown as a city of psychos and sex perverts. Another movie from 1978, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, turns the Bay city into a haven for an alien invasion where humans are being harvested. Granted, this was the city of the Zodiac killer, so perhaps there was good reason to paint it as a locus of dangerous activity. In the process, however, the filmmakers lose a lot of the capital they could have gotten out of their setting. The city's cultural opulence is dulled, with the exception of a sequence in a retrospective movie house and the denouement, which occurs during a performance of The Mikado (both sequences turn their settings into places of destruction). It's as if art itself is merely a breeding ground for violent criminal behavior. Or maybe it exacerbates the behavior.

The whole assassination plot is a bit half-cocked, but you don't go to this kind of movie for brilliant storytelling. The sequence where Goldie and Chevy race across San Francisco, wrecking several cars in the process, is a clunky way to liven things up. Burgess Meredith offers liveliness of a natural kind. He plays Hawn's landlord, a kindly retired anthropologist with a Black Belt in Karate that comes in handy during a scuffle with the radiantly evil-looking Rachel Roberts.

With Eugene Roche, Brian Dennehy, and Marilyn Sokol. 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) is a re-imagining of the 1956 cult classic directed by Don Seigel. In the 1950's version, people read into it a social commentary on the communist scare that seemed to be gripping the nation. Ultimately, it was a fear of becoming un-American. Identity was so wrapped up in nationalism that to lose your Americanism might have felt like the ultimate displacement. It was set within the banal landscape of suburban America, where everyone was already a conformist anyway. The aliens, unseen except in the form of seemingly harmless pods with little flowers on them, are making duplicates of the townspeople so that they can take over their world.

Twenty years later, Philip Kaufman retells this weird story (originally conceived by Jack Finney in his novel, The Body Snatchers) in San Francisco, hardly a foe to the non-conformist. The movie uses its racially and ethnically diverse, politically liberal and liberated city as a wonderfully ironic backdrop: besides the fact that it's a crowded city, it's a modern, hip city, and so how can you really tell that people are suddenly acting out of the ordinary? There is no ordinary there.

Brooke Adams plays Elizabeth, a lab analyst for the public health department. Her boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle) wakes up acting rather different from his usual demeanor, and it starts to freak her out. When she tells her colleague and confidant Matthew (Donald Sutherland), he suggests a consultation with his shrink-friend Dr. Kibner (Leonard Nimoy). The movie mocks our increasing reliance on therapy as a panacea for unhappiness and discontentment, and in Body Snatchers, Dr. Kibner is proffered up as some kind of 20th century Messiah. We meet him at a book signing, where he's being inundated with fans/readers in need of counseling. His calm, emotionless persona (which probably served him well as Dr. Spock in the Star Trek movies) is already so much like one of those pod people that you're immediately suspicious of him. He seems to care about finding solutions, and yet he doesn't seem to listen to people. He's condescending, as though he's aware of some supreme joke that his needy patients couldn't possibly get.

Matthew's friends, Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright), have their own pod person encounter when something that looks like a duplicate of Jack begins growing in their massage parlor. Jack notes how the features resemble his, but that the thing is unformed, lacking such recognizably human features as fingerprints or respiration. As the pods progress throughout the city, Elizabeth, Matthew, Jack, and Nancy become increasingly alienated in their conviction that something is terribly awry in their world.

There has yet to be a better version of this story. Kaufman injects into it a really kooky atmosphere. The cinematography, by Michael Chapman, is first-rate. He uses lots of off-kilter angles to give the movie a distorted look (this, coupled with the setting of hilly, already distorted looking San Francisco, makes you feel like nothing is very grounded or "sane" to begin with). The music by Denny Zeitlin is at times like something from John Williams, but then he infuses it with pulsating synthesizers that zing at just the right moments, reminding you of the corny period of movie-making from which this movie hails, the 1950s. It was an era obsessed with half-human monsters and apocalyptic alien invasions. The 1970s, up until the tail-end of the decade, was much more interested in lighter space fare. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was about the beauty and mystery and mutual admiration of an alien encounter. And then there was Star Wars, which wasn't really about alien encounters, but certainly took away the anxiety about them that people have so often worked out in movies.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 joins the ranks of the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the decade, from Klute to The Conversation to All the President's Men. It channels the vibe going through a country that was freaked out and frustrated by the government, politicians, public leaders in general, institutions, crime. I kept thinking about David Fincher's 2007 movie Zodiac, which is about the Zodiac Killer who terrorized San Francisco in the early 70s. Invasion of the Body Snatchers puts the city into an altogether different state of panic, but the fear of losing one's identity is a fear that can be transmuted to serve the needs of any genre, be it science fiction, horror, drama, or documentary. The pod people are soulless drones like George Romero's zombies in Dawn of the Dead (1979), or the brain-dead Barbie doll women in The Stepford Wives (1975). The only difference is that in Body Snatchers, the pod people are masterful survivalists. They're adapting to our world and our human forms. The drones in Dawn of the Dead are just reanimated corpses, and the drones in The Stepford Wives are robots. They're not surviving.

As for the performances, Brooke Adams gives probably her best, most believable one. She has a natural likeability that is so often hampered by the material of the movies she's in, or maybe the directors haven't had the ability to draw it out of her. She shines in this, as does Veronica Cartwright, who's sizzling with energy. Ridley Scott apparently wanted her to put a lid on that in Alien, but in Body Snatchers Kaufman lets her run wild. She's the ultimate eccentric in the land of eccentrics. Almost all of the actors in this movie have done notable work in the genre before or after Body Snatchers, with the possible exception of Donald Sutherland, who carries the film rather well. It was scripted by W.D. Richter.