Invasion of the Body Snatchers

 Year:  1956

Director:  Don Siegel

Screenplay:  Donald Mainwaring, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

Starring:  Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones

Running Time:  80 minutes

Genre:  Science-fiction

Dr. Miles Bennell (McCarthy) returns home from a medical convention to the small California town of Santa Mira, where a surprising number of residents seem to be suffering from the delusion that their loved ones have been replaced by near-identical duplicates.  It soon turns out that the delusion is all too real, slowly the townspeople are being replaced by soulless duplicates spawned from large alien seed pods that threaten to take over the world.

Based on a story by writer Jack Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has gone down as one of the classics of science-fiction, and has been remade several times, most notably in 1978, directed by Philip Kaufman and starring Donald Sutherland in the Kevin McCarthy role.  At the heart of it is a genuinely frightening idea, that the people you love are not themselves any more, and that you yourself could lose your identity and humanity.  To make things even worse, the process of takeover is never really depicted.  The duplicates grow out of the alien pods, hence the term "pod-people" which has come to enter pop culture, despite never being spoken in the film.  What happens to the original is never explained, although it is hinted that the original is somehow destroyed.  The film was released at the height of the Cold War and it has divided people over whether it is a left wing or right wing film.  Some people saw it as an allegory for the "Red under every bed" scare, while others saw it as an allegory for the dangers of McCarthyism (Senator Joe McCarthy and his obsession with rooting out Communists - real or imagined).  Director Don Siegel claimed that the film was about insomnia - the pods duplicate the original while they sleep, and Siegel suffered terrible insomnia throughout his life.  Whatever political leanings you have, you can read something into the film to suit yourself, but at it's core it is a science-fiction thriller and the scenes where McCarthy and his girlfriend Dana Wynter are running from the alien townspeople is really suspenseful.  The performances are good, and the script is pretty adult for a science-fiction film of the time, when most sf films seemed to be pitched to children's Saturday matinees, or drive-in double features.    Future director Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch (1968) and Straw Dogs (1971) appears briefly as a meter reader.  Apparently early test audiences found the film's conclusion too downbeat and so an additional prologue and epilogue were shot, which does dilute the tension somewhat at the end, but the scene of a hysterical McCarthy in the middle of a freeway shouting at unheeding traffic as it shoots by him is one of the classic sequences of science-fiction cinema: "They're already here!  They're not human!  They're coming for you!"

It came from the vegetable patch: Dana Wynter, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones and Kevin McCarthy face an Invasion of the Body Snatchers