The Invaders, a Quinn Martin production (as the announcer intones at the top of the show), can be handily described as the missing link between The Fugitive and The X Files. Now, let’s anatomize it more thoroughly.
American television in the 1960s had developed the “loner” premise of the Western, with its wandering paladins of justice, into a more contemporary and paranoid form with Quinn Martin’s enormously popular The Fugitive, about a man on the run by force rather than choice, a man who can trust no one, who can’t settle down in one place, who’s driven by an endless mission that seems eternally out of reach.
Meanwhile, there was a man named Larry Cohen. He’s best known for writing, directing, and producing some fine trashy genre pics of the ’70s, such as Bone, Black Caesar, It’s Alive, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, and God Told Me To, and he’s still on the scene with screenplays such as Phone Booth and Cellular. He’s a fine writer with a knack for paranoia and a head for political subtext whose formative creative years were spent in television. He made an early splash writing for anthologies and respected series like The Untouchables (also for Quinn Martin), The Defenders and that same The Fugitive (“probably one of the best episodes they ever did”, he declares without false modesty in his commentary here).
He’d already created two series: Branded was one of the loner-westerns, with Chuck Connors as a driven hero who tries to clear his reputation. Cohen says he made the mistake of explaining to Connors that it was a parable of the Hollywood blacklist. Then came the aborted summer series Coronet Blue, whose secret was never explained to the audience. The hero was an amnesiac who tried to find out his own identity – a premise that’s all over the place today when amnesia seems essential to the American character in films and television.
In fact, as the show never got around to revealing before it ended, he was a Russian spy who’d tried to defect to the US and been left for dead. Cohen’s partial inspiration was Alfred Hitchcock’s film The 39 Steps, and we can see how it ties in with such shows as The Prisoner and Alias, not to mention near-forgotten tidbits like VR5 and Strange Luck.
Thus Cohen was hot, and so was Martin, when the former pitched to the latter this idea of Invasion of the Body Snatchers crossed with The Fugitive. Cohen says he also wrote about 20 plot outlines. That was the extent of his involvement, whereas he’d been more deeply involved in his other series. In exchange for a good profit share and credit as the creator, Cohen handed the ball to Martin and moved on to other projects. The show materialized in January 1967 as a midseason replacement, the 17 episodes of which are in this handy set, and then ran for one more season before exhausting itself.
Watching the show today, one’s first wish is that Cohen had actually produced and written the episodes because there’s a clear tension between the viability of his plot ideas and the often clumsy, plodding execution, especially in the writing. Roy Thinnes plays “architect David Vincent”, as the announcer calls him at the start of every episode. There are two stentorian disembodied voices on this show; one is a typical announcer for the opening credits of Quinn Martin shows, and one is a gratuitously Serling-esque narrator to book-end the stories, perhaps because The Twilight Zone was seen as a template.
It’s good to be told what his job is because we never see him architecting, although it’s clearly a fine gig that allows him to wear tightly tailored suits and pursue his personal obsession by flying to far-flung corners of the US (all played by near-flung corners of California). But then he implies a couple of times that he’s “given up his life”, so maybe he’s a trust-fund child — the complete package with blond hair, athletic physique and baby-blue orbs. He’s never truly a fugitive in the David Janssen sense; he has a home somewhere, and nobody’s consistently trying to arrest or kill him, despite the superficial similarity to the other series.
One fine night, Vincent wakes from a nap in his car to witness a flying saucer projecting colored lights everywhere. We should mention that, as announced at the top of every episode, this series is “in COLOR”, and the makers are proud of it. It’s from that transitional era in television when the color shows indulged in all kinds of set designs and filter work to give us an eyeful, though occasionally the faces are too orange and I don’t think that’s the fault of digital remastering. I think it’s part of the “proof” of color.
So anyway, there’s orange, green, and blue everywhere about the silver saucer, and it’s flashing on Vincent’s face (another recurring motif), and he knows the nightmare has begun, and he must tell the world before it’s too late. It never occurs to him for a moment that the visitors might be friendly and that we should establish contact, like those wimpy scientists in certain ’50s movies who got evaporated for their pointy-headed idealism, even though the aliens spend most of the first episode making no attempt to kill him when they easily could until he finally becomes a thorn in their side.
This problematic behavior of the aliens is one of The Invaders‘ major flaws. They all carry around joy buzzers or silver dollars with lights, which function both as cell phones and as gadgets that can make anyone drop dead from an instantly diagnosable “brain hemorrhage”, not to mention little crystals that apparently brainwash people, at least temporarily. They employ these devices willy-nilly on anyone who crosses their path, but either they never try them on Vincent or only do so half-heartedly or half-assedly. Sometimes, he theorizes that they “can’t risk it” because it would “attract too much attention” now that he’s been shooting his mouth off. Uh-huh. It would also end the series prematurely.
The aliens have adopted human form and must be periodically rejuvenated at secret installations, or else they start glowing and freaking out, surely leading to undesirable situations. They also have big brainwashing machines in underground papier-maché caves, similar to those in the original Star Trek series. Some of the aliens, but not all of them, have a crooked pinky. When they die, they glow red and evaporate, leaving no bodies.
Vincent forever babbles about the need for “hard evidence” to show “the authorities” that the invaders are real. Mind you, it never occurs to him to carry a camera, except on one occasion when he gets some nice shots and then inexplicably throws the camera down and forgets about it. Never mind also that the aliens clearly have agents in all institutions, from small-town deputies to hospitals to industry to the military and government and even organized religion. Sometimes, Vincent carries a gun to get himself out of a jam, but usually, he resorts to those endless bouts of fisticuffs.
One interesting aspect of The Invaders‘ premise is that Vincent rapidly becomes a well-known crackpot celebrity in certain circles. Sometimes, people even summon him to discuss something they saw, but he often follows the lead of newspaper stories about some bizarre incident that occurs in the pre-credits sequence. In The Invaders‘ second season, he begins to receive support from a loose association of believers. It seems remarkably easy for Vincent to convince strangers that he’s not a crank.
What’s the show got besides all this nonsense? A real sense of paranoia, in spades and seven ways from Sunday. No matter how absurd, convenient, contrived, far-fetched, illogical or inconsistent the scripts, and they are all of these, one or two vivid scenes per episode show a seemingly normal, all-American situation or stereotypical character (a benevolent minister, an old biddy) suddenly revealing a crack in its reassuring surface, beneath which is the frisson of something not right.
Despite Vincent’s dogged faith in the authorities, the show’s sinister, pessimistic vibe tends to undermine him. There’s even one episode where the aliens use the local church to manipulate the weather. Their explanation about the “abandoned church” doesn’t make sense since the Catholic hierarchy doesn’t assign new priests to abandoned churches, but again, what matters is the revelation of how the organ and congregation mask an evil purpose.
This episode, “Storm”, is also notable for having Latino aliens in its setting of a fishing village; African-Americans are virtually absent from the first season, though one or two are glimpsed. Most of the aliens are homely middle-aged white guys, as are most of the non-aliens, except for the aging matrons who can’t be trusted and, of course, the pretty young women who cross Vincent’s path. Two of these, one alien and one human, have feelings for him and are thus doomed not to survive the episode.
The alien woman (Suzanne Pleshette in “The Mutant”) confesses with hesitation that she has “a difference” from the rest of her kind. She’s always known she had this difference, and the one we’d call her “father” had it too. Vincent characterizes this as “the ability to feel”, but one of the unspoken ironies of this series is that aliens are often more character-ful and at least capable of feigning more emotions than Vincent, who pursues his path like a humorless automaton.
Speaking of differences, Cohen’s work has an interesting relationship to homosexual characters and themes. These are overt in The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover and his thrillers Special Effects and Perfect Strangers, which both feature the same gay private detective, surely a first in film history. Cohen doesn’t mention it here, but in a long article about The Invaders at Classic TV History.com, The Invaders: The Nightmare Has Already Begun Stephen Bowie quotes him admitting that the whole “crooked pinky” gimmick was a nod towards gay subtext as a symbol of effeminacy. “When this show was done back in the sixties, the homosexual community was kind of a submerged, invisible community. People were living secret lives. I thought, here are these aliens living amongst society, keeping their true identities secret, their true selves secret, and this is funny because the pinky kind of symbolizes homosexuality in some way, and nobody will get the gag, but I’ll put it in there anyway.”
“The Ivy Curtain” attempts academic satire in its depiction of an exclusive school where the aliens are trained by a campily effete, orchid-sniffing Dr. Reynard (Murray Matheson), sipping tea with pinky extended. One scene has the young students doing the frug or similar youthful gyrations in front of a rock band and having a kind of subversive conversation hour as the master praises or corrects their techniques for “spreading hate”. One mod girl warns about the country turning into a police state, and a shaggy boy declares that LSD is all right.
If this seems like a way to demonize youth culture for a conservative middle-class viewership, we should add that the first zinger in the scene is the assertion that “we should bomb Red China before they bomb us”, the kind of sentiment some of those viewers might have endorsed. The episode had earlier indulged in lectures about how humans are primarily motivated by fear and how this emotion is the main tool for manipulating them. So certain details haven’t dated.
Compare this to the British UFO, which arrived a few years later. It, too, had bad aliens who looked like us, but though its stories sometimes delved into the fractious politics of bureaucracy or the personal cost of devotion to the cause, it basically celebrated institutions rather than being afraid of them. It featured an organization of people working together as a well-oiled machine (as the aliens are often depicted in The Invaders), everyone pulling together toward a common goal. It’s a concept of people who remember the Blitz with a stiff upper lip and who feel no cause for shame or hysteria. Consider too the faith in military authorities and the men who do their jobs in Jack Webb’s Project U.F.O. from 1978, when Vietnam was a repressed memory.
The Invaders, on the other hand, is Cold War Central with the Vietnam blues. The complete pilot version of the premiere, which is included as a bonus, contains a few extra minutes of footage, including a conversation between Vincent and his soon-to-be-late partner (James Daley) in which the latter draws a parallel between Vincent’s story and a distant memory of when he ranted about “them” in a hospital in Korea. This underlines the Cold War metaphor and, most interestingly, tends to question Vincent’s reliability.
The Invaders does mention the word “Vietnam” in one episode: “Moonshot”, about a heroic vet turned astronaut who’s actually been replaced with an impostor a la Manchurian Candidate. Other episodes refer to Korea, the era’s displaced metaphor (see also M*A*S*H). Two episodes feature decorated veterans who, out of bitterness mixed with fear or ambition, have allied themselves with the aliens.
Cohen’s commentary is on “The Innocent”, one of the two or three best episodes. In a riff on his role in The Day the Earth Stood Still, Michael Rennie plays an urbane alien named Magnus who tries to explain that the aliens have learned from their mistakes and that a change in command has led to a new policy of helping humans. This leads to a neat game with reality that wouldn’t disgrace The Prisoner, thanks to an elaborate sequence at Rossmore Leisure World, a retirement home in Laguna Hills.
Cohen says he conceived the series as a parody of Cold War concerns and that he enjoys it but recognizes a few problems. He says he would have made Vincent’s character more interesting and that he defeats the aliens too easily. He also thinks the show has “too many aliens” who are too much in control instead of making a mystery out of who’s an alien. Of course this choice increases the paranoia.
One thing Cohen doesn’t mention is the show’s failure sufficiently to exploit the ambiguity of whether the aliens might be good or bad, a point Rennie’s character raises in this episode and Pleshette’s character before him. There’s a later episode where, in a particularly senseless set-up about a fugitive alien who freezes folks while simultaneously fleeing from and seeking out his people, Vincent holds at bay the fresh-faced alien (Robert Walker Jr., channeling the creepitude of his father in Strangers on a Train) who says he’s just been drafted and doesn’t like what he’s doing, which leads Vincent to make glib remarks about Nazis just before the kid irrationally gives himself away by trying to run two people over.
In the 1980s series V, complexity was generated by factions within aliens and humans, so there were wheels within wheels, balances and upsets, traitors, and double agents. This factional element hit critical mass in The X-Files and was partly embodied by none other than Thinnes in a recurring role as an ambiguously helpful alien. That was a show that knew and respected its forebears.
The best episode is the season’s penultimate, “Wall of Crystal”, which, out of the blue, mentions that Vincent has a family and is thus susceptible to blackmail. Apparently, this family is never brought up again either, but for the duration of this episode, there’s his brother, Dr. Bob Vincent (Linden Chiles), and Bob’s pregnant wife, Grace (Julie Sommars). This week’s coldly efficient alien apparatchik (Edward Asner) puts the relatives in jeopardy in a casually sadistic manner just when our hero finally has a handful of proof to show a prominent newspaper columnist and TV personality (Burgess Meredith). The character dynamics of this episode are intelligent and not always predictable, and the director makes several subtle moves along the way. The pre-credit scene with Peggy Lipton is especially good, too.
Clearly, that episode is a guest-star bonanza, which, along with clumsy conventions and telling social details, adds to the nostalgic charm of the series, even for those who never saw it the first time. I also love how the opening announcer gives a shout-out to tonight’s guests; that was a Quinn Martin staple, like dividing the segments between commercials into “acts” and an “epilogue”. Similarly, I loved how MTM comedies gave everyone in the cast a window at the show’s end. Today, distinctive opening titles (and attendant theme music) have all but vanished, while closing credits are reduced to a tiny scroll in the corner as we’re bombarded with scenes and sounds of junk we don’t care about. We may be in a new golden age of TV, but credits have gone to hell in a handbasket.
Returning to the point, other actors who show up include Lynn Loring (Mrs. Thinnes at the time), Roddy McDowall, Jack Lord, Diane Baker, J.D. Cannon, Ellen Corby, Laurence Naismith, Harold Gould, Arthur Hill, Louise Latham, Diana Hyland, Jeanette Nolan, William Windom, James Whitmore, Susan Strasberg, Peter Mark Richman, Dabney Coleman, Jack Warden, Susan Oliver, Norman Fell, John Larch, Frank Overton, Robert Emhardt, Ed Begley, Laura Devon, Dabbs Greer, William Talman, Joseph Campanella, Barbara Luna, R.G. Armstrong, Helen Kleeb, Peter Graves, William Smithers, Alfred Ryder, John Ericson, Anthony Eisley, Edward Andrews, Andrew Duggan, Strother Martin, Murray Hamilton and Ralph Bellamy. In other words, those who watched American TV in the ’70s will have a festival of “Hey, I know that face!”
The Invaders‘ sense of style derives from the colors (credit director of photography Andrew J. McIntyre), the special effects (Darrell Anderson), the actors sometimes posing away from each other and delivering with strident intensity, and such directorial choices as tilted angles and the economically staged, subtly paranoid manner of pivoting the camera across 90-degree arcs and peering at Vincent as he walks down corridors. Those directors are Paul Wendkos, Joseph Sargent, Richard Benedict, Sutton Roley, John Meredyth Lucas, and Robert Butler.
The score is largely Dominic Frontiere’s, and it often features unsubtle, action-heavy cues with spacy effects like stings that sometimes sound like a harpsichord. However, there is good music here, much of it recycled from his work on The Outer Limits, especially from the episode “The Forms of Things Unknown”, one of the great achievements of any television anthology.
Viewers should avoid the option of watching The Invaders episodes with new, disposable, spoiler-ridden intros by Thinnes. He also does a bonus interview in which he discusses seeing a real UFO before the series debuted.
The back of the box has fine print declaring “Some episodes may be edited from their original network versions”, but in this case I doubt it. This is a standard disclaimer on CBS/Paramount packages. Occasionally, it’s accompanied by this one on the concurrent Season 2 Part 1 release of The Fugitive: “Some music has been changed for this home entertainment version.” That would refer to clearance issues on source music that might have been replaced in certain scenes, but that warning doesn’t appear on The Invaders.