I saw the movie for the first time in either 2000 or 2001, on AMC's EFX Friday night block when I was visiting my grandmother and aunt, as I did every Friday. While I was a bit taken aback when the movie started and I was hit by the rather bombastic opening title theme, as I watched it, I instantly became a fan of it, to where I got it on VHS in early 2002, and I think it not only deserves its classic status but also that, when viewed in any day and age, it's a truly frightening film. One movie review book that I once had described it as "possibly the scariest movie ever made" and I'm not inclined to disagree with that sentiment. Some may find the story's one true sci-fi element, that of alien seed pods reproducing human beings, to be a ridiculous premise, but the way the story unfolds and presents its core themes is done in a very well-executed and truly scary manner. This is a rare example of any horror movie, let alone one from the 50's, really getting under my skin, with even the forced on framing device that everyone talks about not offering as much comfort as many feel it's meant to. The great performances, direction, and especially the subtlety are what really sell it for me and, in my mind, make it the superior version of this story, although the 1978 and 1993 films definitely have their own strengths (at this point, I haven't seen the 2007 movie with Nicole Kidman).
Late one night, psychiatrist Dr. Hill is called to a California hospital by a colleague, Dr. Bassett, to help with a raving man who is trying to get someone to listen to him. The man, himself a physician, Miles Bennell, is calmed enough to where he begins to tell them his bizarre and frightening story, which began several days earlier. Bennell, the local physician of the small town of Santa Mira, had been called home from a medical convention by his nurse, Sally, who told him that a number of the townspeople were demanding to see him and only him, refusing to tell her or anyone else what the problem was. On the way back from the train station, Bennell and Sally nearly run over young Jimmy Grimaldi, who's running away from his mother, supposedly because he doesn't want to go to school, according to her. At his office, Bennell is further mystified to learn that all of the patients who were clamoring to see him have cancelled their appointments, when an old college sweetheart of his, Becky Driscoll, who has returned after living in England for a while, comes in to see him. She tells him that her cousin, Wilma, is claiming that her uncle, Ira, has been replaced by an imposter, and Bennell agrees to see her. Later that afternoon, a hysterical Jimmy Grimaldi is brought in by his grandmother, claiming that his mother isn't really his mother. Giving the boy a sedative and sending him to stay with his grandmother, Bennell decides to go ahead and visit Wilma. Upon talking to Ira, Bennell is convinced that it's him but Wilma still insists that it's not, saying that he looks, sounds, and acts like him but that there's no emotion, just the pretense of it. Bennell then suggests that she see a psychiatrist friend of his, Dan Kauffman, the next day. That night, he and Becky go out to eat, running into Kauffman in the diner parking lot and learning that he's lately seen a lot of people with stories similar to Wilma's. Before they can eat, Bennell gets a call from Sally, telling him that Jack Belicec wants to see him at his house. When he and Becky arrive, Jack and his wife, Teddy, show them an apparent corpse, albeit looking strangely vague, with no fingerprints; it also faintly looks like Jack. Believing there's a connection to what's going on in town, Bennell tells Jack to sit up with the body and to call him if anything happens, after which he takes Becky home. Late that night, the body, now looking exactly like Jack, becomes conscious and Jack and Teddy flee to Miles' house. Feeling Becky is in danger, Miles goes to her house and makes the first of a serious of terrifying discovers that will lead him to uncover a silent invasion that threatens the entire planet.
Santa Mira is portrayed as one of those very close-knit towns where everybody knows and is close friends with each other, and have been so for years. That's definitely true when it comes to how they relate to Bennell, as everybody either calls him Miles or "Doc." Being the friendly, easygoing, and trustworthy type of guy that he is, it's small wonder why everyone sees him as someone they can talk to and confide in, on a personal basis as well as because he's the town physician. One person he's extremely close to is the lovely Betty Driscoll, an old college friend and sweetheart who has recently returned after having lived in England for a while and, like him, has been divorced. Because of that, once they meet up with each other again for the first time in years, Bennell doesn't waste much time in pursuing her, because of the rekindled feelings he has for her and also because there's a bit of a melancholy to him due to his being divorced. He laments how his marriage didn't work out because of how demanding his job is and, while he's glad that his and Becky's relationship didn't end up that way, he's willing to try it again with her. But, just as it looks like it might become a possibility, he and Becky find themselves in a desperate struggle to keep their very humanity, upon learning of the duplication process of the "pod people" and that, at a certain point, they're the only human beings left in Santa Mira. Horrified at seeing all of his lifelong friends and neighbors become taken over by the emotionless aliens, and unwilling to let himself or Becky lose their ability to emote, Bennell does everything he can to ensure that they escape the town and warn the rest of the world of what's happening. But, try as he may, he's unable to keep his worst fear from coming to pass, when Becky falls asleep and becomes one of the pod people. The moment when he kisses her and instantly realizes what's happened perfectly captures the mix of terror and sadness that overcomes him, and as he makes a desperate run for the highway, his narration sums up not only what he's feeling but also what all those who have gone through it must have felt: "I've been afraid a lot of times in my life, but I didn't know the real meaning of fear until... until I had kissed Becky. A moment's sleep, and the girl I loved was now an inhuman enemy, bent on my destruction. That moment's sleep was death to Becky's soul, just as it had been for Jack and Teddy and Dan Kauffman and all the rest. Their bodies were now hosts, harboring an alien form of life, a cosmic form, which, to survive, must take over every human man. So I ran, I ran! I ran as little Jimmy Grimaldi had run the other day."
As if things didn't already seem hopeless enough for him, when Bennell does make it to the highway, not only do the passing motorists he tries to warn write him off as either drunk or crazy, he finds that one of the delivery trucks is full of the pods and heading to Los Angeles. That makes it feel as if there's absolutely nothing he can do to stop the ongoing invasion and that his frantic warnings are in vain, so it's no wonder why, by the time Dr. Hill begins speaking with him, he seems like a raving lunatic (plus, he's also probably taken more of the pills he first gave Becky in the clinic to keep himself awake). Of course, Hill and Bassett believe him to be completely insane and upon realizing it, Bennell breaks down in hopeless frustration... until an accident involving one of the trucks carrying the pods that was coming from Santa Mira vindicates him. As Hill then frantically tries to contact the FBI, the movie ends on Bennell, clearly relieved that somebody finally believes him.
Another friend of Bennell's who struggles to keep his humanity but ultimately fails is Jack Belicec (King Donovan) and his wife, Teddy (Carolyn Jones). While he's not the first to learn that there's something strange going on, he's possibly the first one to get a look at exactly how the duplication process takes place when he discovers the nearly-formed body that vaguely looks like him in his closet. Like everyone else, he feels more comfortable calling Bennell rather than the police, whom he also asks Bennell not to call, and before he shows him the body, he asks him to forget that he's a doctor. As they examine the body, Jack is the one who describes it as looking as if it isn't "finished," whereas Teddy is the one who notes that it has the same height and weight as her husband, which freaks Jack out so much that he drops a liquor bottle and cuts his hand in the process. Feeling there might be a connection to the strange thing that's happening in town, Bennell asks Jack to stay up and keep an eye on a corpse and to call him if something happens before morning; otherwise, he can call the police the next day. Later on, when Jack falls asleep while sitting up with the body, Teddy becomes hysterical when she sees that it's conscious and looks exactly like him, right down to the cut on his hand. The two of them flee to Bennell's house, who promptly calls Dan Kauffman and then takes the sleeping Becky away from her own home, discovering another double, this one of her, in the basement. Bennell and Jack then try to show Kauffman the bodies but they find that both of them have disappeared from their respective locations, prompting Kauffman to write the episode off as an example of the mass hysteria that's been going around town. Just like Bennell, Jack knows it's not as simple as that and is pretty shaken up, as is Teddy, and the two of them decide to stay with Bennell for the time being. That's when they discover the seed pods in Bennell's greenhouse and, seeing that they're the source of the duplicates, Jack is desperate to destroy them all with a pitchfork, although he's stopped by Bennell. When Bennell tries to make a call to the FBI but fails repeatedly, he sends Jack and Teddy off to get help elsewhere... only to learn the next morning after hiding in his office with Becky that they've become pod people themselves. We never see Teddy again (which makes me wonder if she's even still alive) but Jack is particularly unsettling as one of them because he's all smiles and chipper, talking about how they were wrong to fight against it and that he and Kauffman want to help them. Bennell and Becky ultimately escape from both of them by drugging them, managing to get out of the building.
Two townspeople who try to warn the others that their relatives aren't who they appear to be are little Jimmy Grimaldi (Bobby Clark) and Wilma Lentz (Virginia Christine). The former is first seen running away from his own mother when Bennell and his nurse, Sally, are driving from the train station, and when the doctor asks Anne Grimaldi (Eileen Stevens) what's going, she says that Jimmy simply doesn't want to go to school. In his narration, Bennell admits that should have tipped him off right there, since no kid would be that terrified at the prospect of school, but he doesn't think much of it until later that afternoon, when Jimmy's grandmother (Beatrice Maude) brings him and tells him of his insistence that her mother isn't really her. This scene is quite gut-wrenching, as Jimmy is in tears and scared out of his mind, to the point where he's begging his grandmother to let him go and hysterically crying that Anna Grimaldi isn't his mother, pleading, "Don't let her get me!" It's made even worse when the grandmother tells Bennell that she found Jimmy hiding in her cellar and was begging her then not to call his mother, a plea that he makes to the doctor and his grandmother there in his office. Bennell says he won't but it's merely to placate the boy, as he then tells Sally to call Anna and tell her that he thinks Jimmy should stay with his grandmother. Little does he know that he sealed the boy's fate, because the next time you see him, he's sitting and talking with his mother, having become one of the pod people. As for Wilma, even after Bennell talks with her Uncle Ira, she's still convinced that it's not really him. She admits that, as much as he looks, sounds, and acts like him, there's no emotion or feeling in whenever he speaks to her, just a pretense. She also asks Bennell to say nothing to her aunt, perhaps out of fear that she may be a doppelganger too, and she even asks Bennell if she's losing her mind. He assures that she isn't but she probably does still need psychiatric help and suggests she meet with Dan Kauffman. Wilma agrees but remains convinced that there's nothing wrong and worries that Ira, who's mowing the lawn nearby, might start to become suspicious about their conversation. When Bennell sees Wilma again the next day, she, like everyone else before her, says that she doesn't need to see Kauffman, insisting that everything was clear when she woke up... but when Bennell walks away after mentioning that Becky is with him, Wilma goes into her hardware store and tells Becky's father where she is, confirming what you'd no doubt suspected.
Speaking of Becky's father, Stanley Driscoll (Kenneth Patterson), he's already become a pod person when we first see him, as he comes up from his basement after Bennell has brought Becky home. He claims to have been working downstairs and goes as far as to offer Bennell a nightcap, which he refuses, an act that might have spared him his humanity, as it turns out. When Bennell and the others discover the seed pods in his greenhouse the following night, he realizes that the double of Becky he saw down in the basement when he stole her away in the middle of the night was actually what Stanley was "working on" down there. Moreover, given how Wilma had informed him of where his daughter was earlier, it's very likely that Stanley was the one who put those pods in Bennell's greenhouse. Becky also mentions that, in the short time she was with her father, she noticed there was something off about him, just like Wilma had with her uncle, but she'd told herself that she was imagining it. Stanley doesn't have any other standout moments in the film but he can be seen inside Sally's house, holding one of the pods, which he intends to use to turn her baby girl, and he's part of the mob that chases Bennell and Becky through the hills. When they later chase Bennell out to the highway, he's the one who tells the others to let him go, knowing that no one will believe him, which he's right about. Speaking of Sally Withers (Jean Willes), while she's clearly human when she picks Bennell up at the train station, some time during the night, she also becomes a pod person, fairly cheerfully pointing out to Bennell how Jimmy Grimaldi has "recovered" the next day. When he and Becky are on the run, she's the one person who Bennell believes he can trust, but when he drives up to her house and peeks in, he realizes that's not true at all, as he sees her discussing turning her baby into a pod person by placing one of the pods in her playpen and commenting on how, when she falls asleep, "There'll be no more tears." (A rather bone-chilling line.) While looking in on the meeting, Bennell runs into Nick Grivett (Ralph Dumke), the police chief, who's also been a part of it from the beginning. The night before, he'd told Bennell and Jack Belicec that the body they'd seen at the latter's residence had been found on a burning hay-bail earlier in the evening and threatened to throw them in jail for breaking into the Driscoll household. It quickly becomes obvious that it was merely a plot by the pod people to cover all traces and try to make the men doubt themselves. Grivett is also standing guard nearby when the snatched Jack and Dan Kauffman trap Bennell and Becky in the former's office, waiting for them to become pod people, and gets caught up in their ploy to escape. Jack and Kauffman are merely drugged by Bennell but Grivett gets killed when Becky takes a scalpel to him.
Finally, you have familiar character actors Whit Bissell and Richard Deacon, both uncredited, as Hill and Bassett, the respective doctors in the framing device that the studio forced Don Siegel to add after principal photography. Bissell is an especially familiar face to fans of the genre, as he appeared in movies like Creature from the Black Lagoon, Monster on the Campus, I Was A Teenage Werewolf, and I Was A Teenage Frankenstein, just to name a few, and he often played scientists and doctors (he'd also worked with Siegel before). Deacon is probably best known for his roles on TV shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show and Leave It to Beaver but fans of Alfred Hitchcock should recognize him as Mitch Brenner's neighbor whom Melanie Daniels briefly encounters near the beginning of The Birds. Dr. Hill is called by his colleague, Dr. Bassett, to the hospital in order to try to calm and talk with the frantic Bennell but, after he's told his story, neither of them believe him. That said, Hill is a little more sympathetic and, what's more, open-minded, saying that Bennell can be "cured" if it's all a nightmare, whereas Bassett just writes Bennell off as "mad as a march hare." But, when a truck driver is brought in and the medic mentions having to dig him out from under some strange-looking things, Hill, upon hearing this, immediately asks, "What things?" The guy promptly answers that they looked like big seed pods, and when he says that the truck was coming from Santa Mira, Hill immediately orders the police officers there to have all roads to the town blocked and attempts to contact the FBI, just as Bennell tried to do before.
Like I said, while I do enjoy the 70's remake by Philip Kaufman and Abel Ferrara's 1993 film, simply called Body Snatchers, none of the other versions of this story have ever been quite as effective as this original one to me and one of the main reasons is the setting. While San Francisco and the military base in those respective films are used very well, I've always liked the setting of the small town of Santa Mira the best. For one, having always lived in one of those small, rural communities myself, I've always been able to relate to it more. Like Santa Mira, where I live is the type of tiny town where everybody knows everybody else, for better or worse, and so, I can only imagine how terrifying it would be to realize that people and neighbors whom you've known for years are no longer themselves. Second, I'm always drawn to stories about something sinister happening under the surface of a place like this, one that looks so seemingly innocent and idyllic, because I just like that dichotomy. I guess that can also be seen as a sort of extension of my first point, although, without getting too personal, the area I live in is anything but innocent already. Third, and parts of this are an extension of my second point, the 1950's is one of my favorite decades and I always like these types of portraits of small-town America during this period. There's something I like about seeing these people going about their comfortable, daily routines, feeling secure about their lives in their nice little homes and workplaces, in spite of the silent turmoil that was going on in the world at that time, and, in these types of movies, unaware that there's an evil force amongst them, bent on their destruction (it's one of the reasons why I like The Blob and even The Giant Gila Monster as much as I do). Plus, you got plenty of these types of more relatable settings in the 50's, whereas before, you either had movies taking place in foreign lands or in big, posh, cocktail party establishments, often in large cities. Finally, I like the feeling of isolation you get with this town. The military base in Body Snatchers definitely has this, and the setting of San Francisco in the 70's movie has a very overbearing, closing-in feel to it even before the invasion really kicks in, with danger then feeling like it's around every corner, but once Bennell and the others realize they're the only people left in Santa Mira, unable to contact the outside world because the pod people have control of the phones, chased through the streets by the turned authority figures, and are forced to head into the barren countryside to reach the highway, which you later see already has trucks carrying the seed pods to other parts of the country, I get a much greater feeling of doom.
Besides the setting, I really like the way in which this movie was filmed. Don Siegel was a director who never got particularly showy with how he filmed things (something that I think Philip Kaufman does a bit too much in the 70's movie) and yet, he managed to give his movies an undeniable feeling of style. There are some instances where the camera shoots things from afar, like when Bennell and Becky walk down the stairs leading to the outside of his office (both when they're heading out after reuniting and when they attempt to blend in with the pod people), when the two of them escape into the hills, the entrance to the mine from deep within it, and when Bennell scrambles over the hills to get to the highway at the end, and while they don't call attention to themselves in an arty way, there are memorable in how they look. The same goes for some interesting angles that Siegel puts on things, like when he a shoots a low-angle shot of Bennell and Becky hiding in a closet as a policeman searches for them outside, a close-up of the window and drape in Bennell's office when he looks in at Jack Belicec and Dan Kauffman, and an up-shot of the pod people running across the boards he and Becky are hiding under in the mine: not overly showy, but still done with skill. And then, there's the cinematography itself, done by Ellsworth Fredericks, which is done in a style similar to film noir, with lots of deep blacks and shadows during the many nighttime scenes (which were really shot at night rather than the typical "day for night," causing the shooting schedule to run over), managing to make Santa Mira go from warm and inviting to dark and sinister when the characters are trying desperately to escape.
While the other versions of this story have plenty of frightening and freaky creature effects involving the pods, like the scene in the 70's version where we see the duplicates being born while Matthew Bennell is asleep on the patio and Elizabeth crumbling away in his hands when she succumbs to it, or in Body Snatchers when Carol gets taken over in the bathtub, I really like the subtlety of this film. Given that the film was made for under $400,000 (the original budget was slightly more but was reduced by Allied Artists, forcing producer Walter Wanger and Don Siegel to abandon the bigger names they first had in mind for the cast), you shouldn't expect a visual effects tour-de-force. In fact, the only overtly sci-fi part of the film are the seed pods, especially in the scene in the greenhouse where you see them opening up and revealing the duplicates; otherwise, the movie is mainly made as an eerie mystery, with the characters merely stumbling across the doppelgangers either not quite finished or complete but not yet functional. For me, the idea of Jack Belicec finding that unfinished duplicate of himself in his closet, its coming to life by fluttering open its eyes as it lies on the pool table, Bennell making the shocking discovery of a virtually complete one of Becky down in her basement, and one of the pods about to be placed in a baby's play-pen so she can be turned, is creepier than any gross, over-the-top special effects. The same goes for when Becky succumbs and becomes a pod person herself. As horrifying as the effects of this process are in the later versions, her simply falling asleep, Bennell realizing what's happened by kissing her, and her opening her eyes, no longer herself but now one of the aliens, gets to me a lot more.
While it's never mentioned in the movie, the notion of people claiming that their loved ones have been replaced by imposters is a real phenomenon called Capgras delusion and thinking about what it would be like to be caught up in that mindset adds to the terror of this story, even more so when it's revealed to not be a delusion at all. Just imagine that you wake up one day and realize that your close friends and relatives no longer have the emotions and personalities they once did and feel like complete strangers, even though they look and sound the same. Not only is that a scary premise in and of itself but the same also goes for the two possible outcomes: either you're losing your mind or everyone else has possibly been replaced too and even if they haven't, they're unlikely to believe you. Seeing characters like little Jimmy Grimaldi, Wilma Lentz, and even Miles Bennell himself, during the last bit of the main story, going through this is really unsettling. I especially feel bad for Jimmy, as he's an absolutely hysterical little kid, crying his eyes out from sheer terror and begging the adults to believe him when he says that his mother isn't really her, but possibly knowing that they won't believe him because of how young he is (which they don't, with Bennell unwittingly sealing his fate by telling Sally to call Anna Grimaldi). You can see a similar terror in Wilma when she tells Bennell that the man who's mowing the yard nearby may look and sound like her Uncle Ira but it's not him. She talks about how he's been a father to her throughout her life and that before, whenever he spoke to her, he had a very special look in his eye that's now missing. He may remember everything like he should but there's no feeling to him anymore, and you can see a little bit of it yourself when, as Bennell and Becky are leaving, Ira talks to him and says, "Nice having Becky back again, eh, boy?" He may have a smile on his face and seems genuinely friendly, but you can detect that pretense of emotion that Wilma described in his inflection. The same goes for others who turn out to be pod people, like police officer Sam Janzek, Stanley Driscoll, and Nick Grivett: when you watch the movie again, knowing that they've now been taken over, you can see that there's something not quite sincere in the way they speak, even when they're being friendly.
I mentioned The Blob earlier when talking about the movie's setting, but another thing the two movies have in common (besides being ostensible B-movies that have since become so much more) is the vague origin of their extraterrestrial threats. Like the Blob, all you really know about the pods is that they're from space: they began as seeds of an unknown alien origin that drifted through the cosmos for many years before finding their way to Earth, coming down in a farmer's field, taking rooting, sprouting the pods, and beginning the invasion. That's another spooky thing about it: there was no rhyme or reason to how this happened, that these things just came from the sky and began taking over. Whether there's any sort of real intelligence to the actual pods or if the duplication process is a natural one and the pod people are the true race is unclear but, regardless, the process itself is a fairly simple one: when the pods are near a person or persons, each one of them focuses on a specific individual, developing the duplicates within them, which eventually pop out and finish growing within a thick, milky white substance (the Freudian overtones here are overwhelming, especially given what the pods look like from certain angles), slowly but surely taking on the details of their intended hosts. As seen when Jack Belicec finds his intended duplicate, if you find one of the bodies before the process is finished, you come across an apparent corpse with no character to its features, including fingerprints. Once the body is finished, the process is completed when the intended host falls asleep and their mind is absorbed into the new body, which adds to the story the same kind of horrific inevitably that would later be found in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. You can run as far as you want but, sooner or later, you'll have to go to sleep and once you do, they've got you.
That said, though, there are some details about the process of being "snatched" that aren't made completely clear. One, which is fairly minor, is what happens to the seed pod after the process is completed. If you're wondering why I bring that up, it's because I wonder why Jack Belicec found his forming duplicate in his closet but not the pod it came from. It must have disintegrated, because I'm sure Jack wouldn't have missed something like that, and plus, when Bennell finds Becky's duplicate down in her basement, there's no sign of a pod near the body. Two, why didn't Jack become one when he dosed off while sitting up with the one in his house? Was it in the process of absorbing his mind when Teddy interrupted it when she freaked out upon seeing it open its eyes and that it now had a cut on its hand like Jack? The bigger question in regards to that is, how exactly is one transformed when they fall asleep? At the outset, it seems to be as simple as, if you fall asleep near a pod or body, you'll end up becoming one, but if that's the case, how did Becky become one when she fell asleep in that mine, where there didn't seem to be any around? Plus, Dan Kauffman says that a person's consciousness is transferred to one of the bodies but in this case, it seems like the alien intelligence was transferred into Becky's own body. Shouldn't she have instead awakened in that body that was growing back in Bennell's office? And how far does their reach extend to where you have to keep yourself awake in order to avoid becoming one, becomes it seems to apply even if you're merely in the same state as one, particularly after you've first become aware of their existence. I never quite understood that and the other movies don't clarify it any better.
The pods and their duplicates make up the one piece of special effects work in the whole film, so it's not surprising that they were the costliest parts of the production, with the pods, which were created by the art director, Ted Haworth, costing $30,000 in and of themselves. In this book that I have on horror films, which is one in a series on different movie genres put out by Virgin Films, it's mentioned how a big reason why Don Siegel never ventured into science fiction or horror genre again was because he disliked how the genres seemed to be more interested in special effects rather than story or character and the author goes on to mention that it's telling that the effects sequences here are among the weakest aspects of his direction. I don't agree with that at all; I think the scene in the greenhouse where you see the pods opening up is done really well and I feel the same way about the glimpses you get of the duplicates, both there and in the earlier scenes with Jack and Bennell finding one of Betty down in her basement. The duplicates, which were created by the film's makeup artist, Emil LaVigne, from life-casts of the actors, do look a bit artificial but I think it adds to the notion that they're not human, and, going back to the seed pods, they have an unforgettable, creepy look to them. Out of all the versions of this story, the pods here have to be the most iconic, with their design and those unsettling, alien patterns on them, and watching them leaking that fluid before popping open to revealing the growing doppelgangers has an eerie quality to it. (On a side note, I like how, in the movie Gremlins, this scene is playing on the television and that Billy and Gizmo fall asleep watching it before waking up to find that the other mogwai have made pod-like cocoons themselves. And then, of course, there's the part in the sequel where Christopher Lee comes in, carrying one of these very pods.) I will admit, though, that the way the completed duplicates are revealed underneath what looks like soap bubbles is a little silly, but that's counterbalanced by how much it makes me squirm to see the characters brandishing a pitchfork over their newly formed, shining flesh, with Bennell plunging it into the one that looks like him.
When someone becomes a pod person, instead of completely losing themselves, their minds are absorbed into the newly produced bodies, so there's still a trace of who they were in there; it's that, now, they no longer have emotions. As such, they instantly accept what they've become and are filled with a strong survival instinct, turning on those around them so they can be captured and changed in order to preserve their race. This is best exemplified when Becky turns at the end: like I said, after fighting to stay awake and keep her humanity, once she becomes one, she tells Bennell that the others were right about the change and, when he refuses to submit, she yells for the others to get him. As cruel as it is, the pod people don't see it this way; in fact, they think they're doing mankind a favor by relieving them of the "burden" of emotions and feelings, which they see as making life needlessly complex. When they trap Bennell and Becky in the office to transform them, Jack Belicec and Dan Kauffman insist that they're going to help them, that the change won't be painful, and that they'll wake up in an "untroubled world." They're described as an evil force throughout the film but, while they're certainly frightening, that's not the right way to describe them. They may be intent on turning every last human being on the planet into one of them by spreading their seed pods from town to town and trapping people near them to force the change, with Kauffman flat out telling Bennell that he and Becky have no choice in the matter, but since they have no emotions, they obviously can't feel hate any more than they can love, so this isn't coming out of malice. Rather, it's simply their instinct and drive to survive, as they know other humans are dangerous to them. But, as intelligent and subtle as they are in their invasion, they can be fooled into thinking that you're one of them if you walk around with a blank expression on your face and show no emotion whatsoever, an idea that Bennell that comes up with and almost succeeds, until Becky spoils it.
Whether or not they're wholesale evil, the pods are still frightening creatures, especially in how unseen their invasion is. You have people who were desperate to see Dr. Bennell as they witnessed strange behavior in their loved ones cancel their appointments as they themselves are taken over, as well as those who did see him suddenly appear recovered, until there are virtually no humans left in Santa Mira and our characters realize that they can't call for outside help because they've take control of the phones or leave because the police have been turned as well. And then, you see the scope of their intended plan, as they prepare to transport the seed pods, which they're growing by the thousands in greenhouses outside of town, to the towns around Santa Mira via produce trucks, pod people with relatives in specific towns, and unsuspecting visitors to the town, eventually encompassing all of the country and probably the entire world. It keeps ratcheting up until, by the time you get to the ending of the main story, where Bennell has lost everyone in his life to the pods, is unable to get any of the people on the highway to listen to him, and sees trucks carrying them to big cities in the state, the hopelessness levels have completely shot through the roof.
That leads us into the framing story that the studio forced upon Walter Wanger and Don Siegel. As anyone who's read up on the movie knows, the story was originally meant to be a straightforward narrative, unfolding as it happens and ending on a very bleak note with Bennell helplessly yelling at those disbelieving motorists on the highway, unable to do anything to stop the pod people from spreading further. Allied Artists, however, got cold feet at that prospect and had Siegel and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring come up with the prologue and epilogue that makes the actual story a flashback, with narration by Bennell coming in every now and then, and gives the movie a more hopeful ending, as the doctors now realize that Bennell's story is true. Siegel always made it clear that he disliked this addition, which was why he very much endorsed the extremely bleak ending of Philip Kaufman's version twenty plus years later, but, while I can't deny that the film would have been very different had the frame story not been added onto it, I feel that the frame story has a couple of elements to it that many seem to overlook. Until the very end of the movie, when the doctors hear of the accident involving the truck driver and his needing to be dug out from underneath the seed pods, it's not farfetched to think that, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, what we've been watching is something that happened only in the deranged, drug-fueled mind of a raving madman who's been awake for hours. The fact that the flashback shows us scenes that didn't involve Bennell and, therefore, are events he couldn't have possibly known, adds some credence to that, and it's only after the ending and looking up the movie's history that you realize it was an oversight on the filmmakers' part (they were lucky that so much of it is told from Bennell's point of view). Also, I don't know if I would call the ending a happy one; more bittersweet, at best. Okay, so Bennell got them to believe him and steps are being taken to stop the invasion, but who's to say they'll succeed? God knows how much time has elapsed since the end of Bennell's story and when he was brought into the hospital, not counting the time it took him to tell it. By this point, that truck that was full of seed pods that he saw has probably made it to San Francisco and they've begun taking over the city, as well as anywhere else in the country, so who knows if they can still be stopped? And even if the invasion is stopped, Bennell has still lost everyone in Santa Mira that he's known for years, including the woman he loved, so a buttload of good it'll do him personally.
Many of the people involved with the film, like Siegel, Wanger, Kevin McCarthy, and even Jack Finney, the author of the original novel, The Body Snatchers, always insisted that the movie was never meant to have any political overtones. Finney said that his main interest in writing the book was in the aforementioned Capgras delusion, whereas Siegel, while admitting that there was a bit of allegory in exposing the type of people he referred to as "pods," those being the soulless people who don't care about culture in any way and try to make others like them (he tended to refer to the studio as being full of pods when they forced that wraparound on him), and that the references to McCarthyism and totalitarianism were inevitable, he didn't intend to push any political meaning simply because he felt film was meant to be entertainment first and foremost. Of course, that hasn't stopped people from seeing such overtones in the film, and given the time in which it was made, it may be a case of such readings being inescapable, as Siegel said. You can definitely see hints of both anti-McCarthyism and especially anti-communism in it, with the idea of those who are silently integrating themselves among us (Bennell's famous line, "They're here already! You're next!" is dripping with those overtones) and Bennell once referring to the pod people as, "A malignant disease spreading throughout the whole country," which is akin to how Adlai Stevenson described communism in his campaign speech when he became the Democratic nominee for president in 1952, as well as fear of conformity in postwar America, with some viewing society as being regulated in a way that it had never been before that time and becoming more like the Soviet Union in the depersonalisation that stemmed from it (what do the pods do but wipe out all sense of individuality?) The way Dan Kauffman talks about the good side of being an emotionless pod has been seen by some as playing on a fear that conformity is a superior social condition, as well as perhaps his way of being a spokesperson for Communism.
While it doesn't blatantly reference them, the movie does acknowledge that its story takes place in a turbulent period of time, with lines like when Bennell tells Wilma, "Even these days, it isn't as easy to go crazy as you might think," and when, in his introductory scene, Kauffman says that the epidemic of mass hysteria that's seemingly going around could be a result of people being upset about what's happening in the world. Me personally, I've always felt that the loss of individuality and of humanity, in political and social terms or otherwise, was the core of the movie, be it in oneself or those around them. The idea of lost humanity is a theme that always gets to me personally in horror and science fiction films, and while becoming a pod person doesn't seem as physically painful as turning into a werewolf or what Andre Delambre and Seth Brundle go through in both versions of The Fly, it's no less disturbing, particularly when it's your loved ones that are becoming something else. I don't want to sound like a broken record but, again, the idea of realizing that your friends and family are no longer who they once were is as nightmarish as you can get. I think Bennell sums up what the movie is about best during the scene when he and Becky are first hiding in his office: "In my practice, I've seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn't seem to mind... All of us, a little bit, we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear..."
When pressed to come up with an aspect that they find to be rather unsuccessful, even the movie's most devoted fans will usually point to the music score by Carmen Dragon, which Siegel was not a fan of either. It's often accused of being too overdone and bombastic for a movie like this, which is meant to be subtle and creeping, and like I said in the introduction, I was taken aback by how over-the-top the main theme is when it plays over the opening credits. It starts with this climbing string bit and leads into this very loud, exaggerated piece that sounds very typical of a B-level horror movie of the time. The same goes for a similarly overdone piece when Bennell uncovers the body in Jack Belicec's house and examines it. That belongs in a movie that's more exploitative and campy. Regardless, I don't hate the score, as there are some parts of it that I think are effective, such as these loud, threatening chords that play when Bennell realizes that Becky might be in danger and the score's constant use of piano keys, be it kind of the background, like when they find that that body house has no fingerprints, or pounding, such as when said body opens its eyes and when Dan Kauffman tells Bennell that he and Becky have no choice in whether or not they want to be part of the pod people. The music that plays when the pods are breaking open in the greenhouse is another instance of it being a tad overbearing but it kind of works there. I also think that the music for the chase scenes are nicely exciting, the softer pieces for the moments between Bennell and Becky are nicely done, that main theme works really well for the moment when Bennell kisses Becky and realizes she's been turned, the music during the highway sequence gives a major feeling of hopelessness, and the last bit I think helps with the notion that whether or not the pod people will be stopped is still up in the air. Finally, I have to mention the sound of that woman singing that gives Bennell and Becky false hope that they aren't the only people left, only for the former to discover that it's just coming from the radio of a truck that's being loaded with the pods. The way it sounds is hauntingly lovely and the revelation that it's an artificial recording coming over a radio adds to the feeling of dread, compounded by how it coincides with when you learn that the pods are being grown by the thousands.
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