Kevin McCarthy and Edie Sedgwick at a pool party in New York City(1965)

Associated Press:

Soon after, he became an early member of the Actors Studio and was chosen by Elia Kazan to play Biff, the son of Willy Loman, in the London production of “Death of a Salesman.” He repeated the role in the 1951 film starring Fredric March and earned an Oscar nomination as supporting actor.

But while he would consistently win praise for his acting during a long and busy career, his most lasting fame would come for “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” In the 1956 film, he vainly tried to warn residents in his small town of the evil pod people from outer space who were quietly taking over the personalities of everyone on Earth.

His frantic shouting of “You’re next!” to those in approaching cars became so well known among science-fiction fans that he was often asked to spoof the role. He more or less did that in the opening minutes of the 1978 remake, which starred Donald Sutherland as the hero menaced by the pod people. (more…)

Spoilers Coming….

AMC’s The Prisoner was awful. The headache inducing flashbacks, incomprehensible sudden and rapid scene changes, incessant and interminable runs through the desert to find the sea, the ever present morose gay son, “11-12,” of “2,” and the lack of any plot tension made the show almost unwatchable. But watch it I did, because I wanted to know both 2’s reasons and the technology that helped create “the Village.” The answer was preposterous. I should have read a “spoiler” review instead.

I never watched the original 1960’s television show, so had no particular expectations. The Prisoner is about a technology company, “Summaker,” which identifies people it presumes need help. It kidnaps them and places them in an induced hallucinogenic state. The hallucination is the “Village,” which looks like a human-sized toy town. The kidnapped live out their lives in a dreary hallucinogenic sameness with identical small pink houses, ambition free jobs, and some sense that all is ok. Villagers are unaware, mostly, they live in a hallucination, although many have odd “dreams” about their past. Dreamers are hunted down and sent down bottomless holes that appear in the ground. We are led to believe they are gone and dead. (Do they go back to the real world?). (more…)

I have to hope for the sake of our country’s future that when people voted for Obama they really had no idea what a disaster he would be, even though I kept warning them that he was a left-wing lug nut.  It seemed to me that his legion of fans had been hypnotized or sprinkled with fairy dust.  They blindly accepted that words like “hope” and “change” were complete sentences that actually added up to a national policy. 

We, who assumed that a grown-up whose friends and mentors were people like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Saul Alinsky, the folks at ACORN and the most corrupt of Chicago politicians, believed he was more likely to belong in a square cell than in the Oval Office. 

For my part, I felt a lot like Kevin McCarthy in the movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” trying to warn my fellow earthlings that the pod people were among us and definitely up to no good.  (more…)