JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 264 из 359This may be because they are working on the fringes of a field which deals entirely with pictures andthe spoken word; they must surely be aware that while it requires at least a high-school education to understand and appreciate all the facets of even such an accessible book as The Body Snatchers , any illiterate with four dollars in his or her pocket can go to a movie and find the junk heart of America. Movies are merely picture books that talk, and this seems to have left many literate movie critics with acute feelings of inferiority.
Filmmakers themselves are often happy to participate in this grotesque critical overkill, and I applauded Sam Peckinpah in my heart when he made this laconic reply to a critic who asked him why he had really made such a violent picture as The Wild Bunch : "I like shoot-em-ups.” Or so he was reputed to have said, and if it ain't true, gang, it oughtta be.
The Don Siegel version of The Body Snatchers is an amusing case where the film critics tried to have it both ways. They began by saying that both Finney's novel and Siegel's film were allegories about the witch-hunt atmosphere that accompanied the McCarthy hearings.
Then Siegel himself spoke up and said that his film was really about the Red Menace. He did not go so far as to say that there was a Commie under every American's bed, but there can be little doubt that Siegel at least believed he was making a movie about a creeping fifth column.
It is the ultimate in paranoia, we might say: they're out there and they look just like us!
In the end it's Finney who comes away sounding the most right; The Body Snatchers is just a good story, one to be read and savored for its own unique satisfactions. In the quarter-century since its original publication as a humble paperback original (a shorter version appeared in Collier's , one of those good old magazines that fell by the wayside in order to make space on the newstands of America for such intellectual publications as Hustler, Screw , and Big Butts ), the book has been rarely out of print. It reached its nadir as a Fotonovel in the wake of the Philip Kaufman remake; if there is a lower, slimier, more antibook concept than the Fotonovel, I don't know what it would be. I think I'd rather see my kids reading a stack of Beeline Books than one of those photocomics.
It reached its apogee as a Gregg Press hardcover in 1976. Gregg Press is a small company which has re-issued some fifty or sixty science fiction and fantasy books-novels, collections, and anthologies-originally published as paperbacks, in hardcover. The editors of the Gregg series (David Hartwell and L. W.
Filmmakers themselves are often happy to participate in this grotesque critical overkill, and I applauded Sam Peckinpah in my heart when he made this laconic reply to a critic who asked him why he had really made such a violent picture as The Wild Bunch : "I like shoot-em-ups.” Or so he was reputed to have said, and if it ain't true, gang, it oughtta be.
The Don Siegel version of The Body Snatchers is an amusing case where the film critics tried to have it both ways. They began by saying that both Finney's novel and Siegel's film were allegories about the witch-hunt atmosphere that accompanied the McCarthy hearings.
Then Siegel himself spoke up and said that his film was really about the Red Menace. He did not go so far as to say that there was a Commie under every American's bed, but there can be little doubt that Siegel at least believed he was making a movie about a creeping fifth column.
It is the ultimate in paranoia, we might say: they're out there and they look just like us!
In the end it's Finney who comes away sounding the most right; The Body Snatchers is just a good story, one to be read and savored for its own unique satisfactions. In the quarter-century since its original publication as a humble paperback original (a shorter version appeared in Collier's , one of those good old magazines that fell by the wayside in order to make space on the newstands of America for such intellectual publications as Hustler, Screw , and Big Butts ), the book has been rarely out of print. It reached its nadir as a Fotonovel in the wake of the Philip Kaufman remake; if there is a lower, slimier, more antibook concept than the Fotonovel, I don't know what it would be. I think I'd rather see my kids reading a stack of Beeline Books than one of those photocomics.
It reached its apogee as a Gregg Press hardcover in 1976. Gregg Press is a small company which has re-issued some fifty or sixty science fiction and fantasy books-novels, collections, and anthologies-originally published as paperbacks, in hardcover. The editors of the Gregg series (David Hartwell and L. W.