Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Directed by Don Siegel. Starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, King Donovan, Larry Gates, Carolyn Jones, Virginia Christine, Kenneth Patterson, Ralph Dumke, Jean Willes, Guy Way.

McCarthy-era conformist paranoia allegory became one of the premier nail-biting hybrids of science fiction and horror of its time, telling the multifaceted story a small-town doctor (McCarthy) slowly realizing that townspeople are being replaced by identical impostors, “hatched” from large extraterrestrial seed pods. Sharp, tense, efficient, and influential; Siegel’s no-frills direction keeps things moving at a steadily escalating clip, but doesn’t have the striking visual aesthetic that could have made it a true masterpiece. Never quite gets past one lapse in logic—why are humanoid duplicates being harvested if the people are able to be taken over from within while they sleep instead of being switched out?—but the more logical “parasite” angle had already been handled by Robert Heinlein’s “The Puppet Masters.” Some prints omit the framing sequences where the anxious protagonist tells the story through flashback to Whit Bissell. Remade/reworked multiple times (1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1993’s Body Snatchers, 2007’s The Invasion). Director Sam Peckinpah has a bit part as a gas meter reader.

83/100