City Slickers

A sequel was released years later, City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly's Gold with Jon Lovitz taking the place of Kirby, but it wasn't received as well as the original. The original version has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. For all of them, but especially Mitch, it's family. Another remake is currently in production, due for release in 2006. Crystal, Kirby, and Stern's characters lead the herd back successfully to the Colorado ranch, and Crystal shares the last thing Curly taught him: what really matters in life is just one thing, and it's different for everybody. It did not receive wide theatrical distribution and was for the most part critically panned. Curly dies soon after they return to camp, and it's left to the people who signed up for this trip to finish the drive because the cook has a broken leg and the trail boss' assistants ran off drunk. In its structure it plays like a straightforward alien invasion thriller, and does not attempt to create the overriding paranoiac mood of the earlier films.

Curly and Mitch eventually bond when they go off to round up strays, and Mitch even asists in giving birth to a calf he names Norman. This time the story was set on a military base, and did not attempt to follow the plot of either the original or the 1978 version. The three men arrive at the cattle drive with other visitors and meet their trail boss, Curly (played by Palance). John, and was directed by Abel Ferrara. Kirby's character, newly married to a woman with supermodel looks, faces the pressure of being a father. It was adapted by Raymond Cistheri, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St. Then Stern's character, the manager of a grocery store owned by his father-in-law, is shocked by one of the checkout girls who he had an affair with, much to the chagrin of his wife who threatens to divorce him. A 1993 version, called Body Snatchers, stars Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly and Gabrielle Anwar.

Crystal's character, Mitch Robbins, feels especially depressed about his job and family. At a party, his lifelong friends (Kirby and Stern) show him a brochure for a Southwestern cattle drive that they've signed up to go on for two weeks. There are distinct similarities between the 1978 film and the tone of the "mythology" episodes of the popular 1990s television series The X-Files. Crystal, Kirby, and Stern are three thirty- or forty-something men each going through their own mid-life crisis. The script could thus be thought to reflect growing anti-government fears that would later manifest themselves among conspiracy theorists. City Slicker is also a derrogatory term for a city dweller. Lacking the Cold War subtext of the original, Kaufman concentrated on a style of paranoia that was more reflective of the mistrust and malaise pervasive in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America. Kaufman's film is set not in a small town but in San Francisco; in one scene, Sutherland's character calls Washington for help, only to find his calls are being intercepted and his name is known to the person on the other line before he gives it. Palance won the year's Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for this film. Richter and directed by Philip Kaufman, and, unlike many remakes, met with generally favorable critical response.

City Slickers is a 1991 movie comedy starring Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby, Daniel Stern, Helen Slater, and Jack Palance. The 1978 version was adapted by W.D. The remake ends with Sutherland's character destroying the "pod people's" facility where they grow the pods, but he is found and turned into a pod person, which is revealed in the last second of the film. As with the first film, it does not have a "happy ending". Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia also appears briefly, as does Robert Duvall.

There are a number of interesting cameo appearances in the film, among them the star and director of the original; Kevin McCarthy appears briefly as a man on the street frantically screaming about aliens (in a shot reminiscent of the final shot of the original) and Don Siegel appears as a cab driver. The first of two remakes appeared in 1978, starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum Veronica Cartwright and Jerry Walter. It was directed by Don Siegel. The screenplay was adapted by Richard Collins (uncredited), Daniel Mainwaring and Sam Peckinpah from the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney.

The taking-over of ordinary citizens metaphorically reflected the paranoia in Cold War America of how communism might infiltrate the body politic in such a way that you would have no way of suspecting if your friends and neighbors had been corrupted. The film is frequently cited as an indictment of the hysteria of McCarthyism during the early stages of the Cold War. Once a pod person is fully grown and integrated into society, he works secretly to spread more pods, so that more people will be taken over. The "pod people" are indistinguishable from normal people, except for their utter lack of emotion.

They emerge from plantlike pods, and grow into perfect physical duplications of their human victims, who themselves die and are discarded. An alien race departs their dying world and lands on Earth. It stars Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 science fiction/horror film which tells the story of ordinary small town people whose bodies are taken over by aliens.