Invasion of the Body Snatchers
with screenwriter W.D. Richter '68 in personThis brilliantly whip-smart statement on urban paranoia and loss of individuality stars Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy and Jeff Goldblum. Discussion follows.
Dartmouth Film Society 75thA whip-smart statement on urban paranoia and loss of individuality, this brilliantly crafted update of the 1956 sci-fi classic written by W.D. Richter '68 loses none of the original's sinister atmosphere, slowly mounting suspense or allegorical force.
All four versions of Body Snatchers start with the same premise. Alien, plant-like lifeforms make their way to Earth and begin discreetly duplicating and replacing human beings, leaving their loved ones terrified and unable to explain to onlookers that their seemingly unchanged spouse or sibling is someone, something different than they were before. What makes this 1978 chiller especially fun is the all-star cast. Donald Sutherland stars as a prickly health inspector, Brooke Adams plays his colleague/love interest, Leonard Nimoy is terrific as a smug, shallow celebrity psychologist, and Jeff Golblum eats the scenery as an overly confident unpublished writer.
Like many good horror stories, it plays on fears that are timeless—and yet it feels eerily relevant in an age where conspiracy theories about the government being taken over from the inside run rampant. In an opinion piece for the New York Times , Maureen Dowd wrote: " Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been repeatedly adapted because the fear it plays on is one at the core of the American self-conception. We see ourselves as a country of defiant individualists bound together by common ideals. Invasion captures our sneaking suspicions that this isn't true."
D: Philip Kaufman, US, 1978, 1h55m
Soft-spoken and dryly funny, Richter tells Hollywood war stories that make you wonder how any movie ever gets made. His road west started at Dartmouth—he arrived on campus in 1964 from New Britain, Connecticut, "the hardware capital of the world," on an academic scholarship and the assumption that he would continue his high school football career. A knee injury put the kibosh on that and kept him out of Vietnam in the bargain. As an English major, he took classes with newly arrived professors Alan Gaylord and Peter Saccio. He also attended Arthur Mayer's legendary film history course and soaked up movies at the Dartmouth Film Society and the Nugget.
Richter—"W.D." in onscreen credits and "Rick" to anyone who knows him—wrote a baker's dozen of scripts from 1973 to 2005. They include the flaky road comedy Slither (1973, directed by Howard Zieff), the early-Hollywood tribute Nickelodeon (1976, directed by Peter Bogdanovich), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, directed by Philip Kaufman)—one of the few remakes as good as, if not better than, its original—and the Robert Redford prison movie Brubaker (1980, directed by Stuart Rosenberg). Ironically, this career-long writer's writer may end up most remembered for one of the few movies he didn't write: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai .
Excerpts from an article in the Dartmouth Alumni magazine written by Ty Burr
Contact Us
Box Office
Box Office Hours:
Tuesday-Friday: 12-5 pmSaturday: 2-5 pm
Open one hour prior to all ticketed events.
Visiting Information
Black Family Visual Arts Center
22 Lebanon Street
Hanover, NH
