‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’

‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ sci-fi movie from 1950s will be screened on Tuesday, January 23 at American Embassy, Auditorium Galle Road, Colombo 3.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 film based on a novel by Jack Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was originally serialized in Colliers Magazine in 1954. It stars Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones.

The film has been remade twice and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

The screenplay was adapted from Finney's novel by Daniel Mainwaring (who also wrote the film classic Out of the Past), along with the uncredited Richard Collins. It was directed by Don Siegel, who went on to make The Killers and Dirty Harry.

Set in the fictional town of Santa Mira, California (actually shot in Sierra Madre, a town east of Pasadena), the plot centers on Dr. Miles Bennell (played by Kevin McCarthy), a local doctor, who finds a rash of patients accusing their loved ones of being impostors. Another patient is an old flame, recent divorcee Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), who tells him that her cousin has this same strange fear.

Assured at first by the town psychiatrist (Dr. Dan Kaufman, played by Larry Gates) that the cases are nothing but "epidemic mass hysteria," Bennell soon discovers, with the help of his friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan), that the townspeople really are being replaced by simulations grown from plantlike pods, perfect physical duplicates who kill and dispose of their human victims.

The Pod People are indistinguishable from normal people except for their utter lack of emotion. The pod people work together to secretly spread more pods-which grew from "seeds drifting through space for years"-in order to replace the entire human race.