Metrograph

Author Jack Finney deserves ample credit for the ingenious, paranoia-inducing concept of his 1955 novel The Body Snatchers—the citizens of a small California town are gradually replaced as they sleep by duplicates that gestate in alien seed pods, their doppelgangers scrubbed of all emotion and individual initiative—but it’s doubtful the idea of “pod people” would remain implanted in the popular imagination 70 years later without Siegel’s screen adaptation of the following year, a marvel of mounting anxiety in black-and-white Superscope starring Kevin McCarthy as an increasingly frantic and friendless holdout and featuring Siegel’s dialogue coach, one Sam Peckinpah, in a brief speaking role as a gas meter reader. “One of the great B-movies, if you want to call it that, of all time.”—Clint Eastwood

Distributor: Paramount