The makers of the film wanted a high-class title for the film. McCarthy suggested Sleep No More, while Siegel came up with Better Off Dead. The studio, wanting something more sensational, submitted They Came from Another World. The final choice of the executives was a compromise, combining a typical sci-fi title with novelist Jack Finney's original. Wanger wanted to add a prologue and epilogue that emphasized the reality of the film, and linked it to actual struggles with totalitarianism in America and abroad. He thought of opening with a quotation from Winston Churchill, but was refused permission. His attempts to get Orson Welles to do the prologue failed as well. The producer's next notion was to feature a famous news analyst interviewing Miles in his hospital bed as an opening lead-in. After unsuccessfully approaching several noted broadcast journalists - Edward R. Murrow, Lowell Thomas, Quentin Reynolds, and John Cameron Swayze - he gave up on the idea. Studio executives agreed with Wanger about the necessity of a framing prologue and epilogue, and brought Mainwaring back to write them. The prologue shows a police car bringing Mark, disheveled and half-crazed, to a hospital where he tries in vain to convince both a psychiatrist (Whit Bissel) and a doctor (Richard Deacon) that seed pods are taking over the planet. In the epilogue, an ambulance brings an emergency case to the hospital. After the driver explains that the man was injured in a crash with a truck loaded with huge seed pods, the psychiatrist places a call to the FBI. Siegel filmed these segments over four days in September, objecting the entire time because he felt that they compromised the power of the original ending. "Allied Artists," he wrote many years later, "was bursting at the seams with pods." Many agree with him, and the picture is sometimes shown in a "director's cut" with the framing devices removed. On the other hand, many of the preceding sci-fi-horror films of the period also end with epilogues informing us that the crisis will continue. An apparently happy ending would cut to, say, an egg hatching or some object hurtling through space on its way to Earth. Then, predictably, a giant question mark would be added to the end title, or "The End" would be replaced with "The Beginning." It had become a well-worn clich�, and this writer ventures the pod-ish minority opinion that the framing story benefits the film. Upon its release, Invasion of the Body Snatchers attracted little attention. The trade papers, which try to review everything, were enthusiastic, but most mainstream critics pointedly ignored it. Attempts to get the film a Broadway opening failed, and it opened instead in Brooklyn. Wanger made a personal plea to Bosley Crowther, film pundit of the New York Times, to view the film but the critic couldn't be bothered. Somehow, the picture logged a whopping domestic gross of $1,200,000. As the years passed, it gradually became recognized as the distinctive movie that it is, even to the extent of being remade twice: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), directed by Philip Kaufman and photographed by Michael Chapman, ASC, transposes the small-town paranoia into the liberal environs of San Francisco while Body Snatchers (1992), directed by Abel Ferrara with cinematography by Bojan Bazelli, transplanted the alien-fueled apprehension to a southern military base. As a home video feature, the original film has enjoyed a long life in black-and-white and colorized versions, and has even been restored for theatrical showings. Many writers and educators have read all sorts of significances into the picture, variously saying it is anti-Communist, pro-Communist, anti-McCarthyist, anti-establishment, and so on and so forth. Wanger, Siegel and Mainwaring all denied such theories, saying that they were only trying to create some popular entertainment. Finney likewise stated that he had no such agendas. After adding Body Snatchers to his resume', Don Siegel's career skyrocketed, and he went on to direct a slew of top-drawer action pictures, including The Killers, Madigan, The Beguiled and Dirty Harry. The ingenuity and imagination that Ellsworth Fredericks brought to Body Snatchers marked a turning point in his career. Before his retirement in 1969, he lent his eye to a number of major productions, including Friendly Persuasion, Trooper Hook, The Light in the Forest and Sayonara (for which he received an Academy nomination). After producing the inconsequential Navy Wife for AA, Wanger returned to independent production in 1958 with the highly successful I Want to Live!. Unfortunately, he next assumed the reins of 20th Century Fox's disastrous Cleopatra, a debacle from which his career never recovered. He was enthusiastically planning new projects at the time of his death in November of 1968.
An Allied Artists picture produced by Walter Wanger Productions, Inc. in Superscope directed by Don Siegel screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring based on the Collier's Magazine serial 'The Body Snatchers' by Jack Finney music composed and conducted by Carmen Dragon director of photography Ellsworth Fredericks, ASC production designer Ted Haworth production manager Allen K. Wood assistant directors Richard Maybery William Beaudine Jr. film editor Robert S. Eisen sound technician Ralph Butler sound editor Del Harris music editor Jerry Irvin special effects Milt Rice set decorations Joseph Kish make-up artist Emile LaVigne, SMA hairdresser Mary Westmoreland script supervisor Irva Ross editorial supervision Richard Heermance contributions to screenplay Richard Collins Sam Peckinpah Western Electric recording Running time ....................... 80 minutes Released May 1, 1956 CAST Dr. Miles Bennell .............. Kevin McCarthy Becky Driscoll .................... Dana Wynter Dr. Dan Kaufman ................... Larry Gates Theodora Belicec ................ Carolyn Jones Jack Belicec ..................... King Donovan Sally ............................. Jean Willes Nick Grivett ...................... Ralph Dumke Wilma Lentz ................ Virginia Christine Ira Lentz .......................... Tom Fadden Grandma Grimaldi ............... Beatrice Maude Jerry Grimaldi .................... Bobby Clark Charlie Buckholtz ............... Sam Peckinpah Dr. Harvey Bassett ............. Richard Deacon Dr. Hill ......................... Whit Bissell Gas Station Attendant ............. Dabbs Greer Sam (Policeman) ....................... Guy Way and Eileen Stevens Jean Andrew Everett Glass Pat O'Malley Guy Rennie Marie Selland Harry J. Vejar