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"El sueño de la razón produce monstruos." The small-town view is from Fury and Shadow of a Doubt, a tale told and a crackpot vindicated. The doctor (Kevin McCarthy) comes home to "an epidemic of mass hysteria," anxious folks claiming that loved ones have been replaced by hollow lookalikes. His courtship of the divorced colleague (Dana Wynter) is interrupted by the body found on the billiards table, a sort of blank clay gradually taking on the features of the writer friend (King Donovan). (A choice deep-focus composition has the would-be novelist in the background, Carolyn Jones as his wife in the middle ground, and the mysterious form horizontal across the foreground as it opens its eyes.) A takeover by cosmic seeds, with aliens who know the lyrics of humanity but not the music—the replicas have no use for emotion, "an untroubled world" is their promise. Foaming, gurgling pods in the greenhouse in a parody of childbirth, the hero flinches with pitchfork in hand until he spots his own lantern-jawed simulacrum. One of the visitors tries to reason with the man of science: "You can understand the wonder of what's happening." Red Menace scare (cf. Cummings' "kumrads" who cannot love) or its anti-Eisenhower opposite, for Don Siegel something more timeless, a primal existential dread. "I've seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only, it happens slowly instead of all at once... They didn't seem to mind." The chase begins on Main Street, goes up vertiginous steps and down under mineral boards, a remarkable image of a whole community stomping on top of the fugitives. The terror of Zen uniformity, spreading out until it's felt like a cold kiss. "What's wrong with madness?" Kaufman and Ferrara have the updates each epoch deserves. Cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks. With Larry Gates, Jean Willes, Ralph Dumke, Virginia Christine, Tom Fadden, Whit Bissell, and Sam Peckinpah. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |