A psychiatrist is summoned to a hospital to examine a lunatic picked up running on the highway. The raving man identifies himself as Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy, in the role of his career) and insists that he isn’t crazy. He proceeds to tell the doctors and police what happened to him.

In flashback, Bennell returns to his family practice in the fictional Santa Mira, California (filmed in Sierra Madre, east of Pasadena). His nurse (Jean Willes) notifies him that several patients have been waiting for him, including his old girlfriend Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter). Becky has a cousin who claims that her uncle is no longer her uncle, while others in town also seem convinced that family members are imposters.

Bennell’s mentor seems to think some kind of epidemic mass hysteria could be at hand, but with the help of their friends (King Donovan, Carolyn Jones), Bennell and Becky discover that townspeople are being replaced by imitations hatched from giant seed pods.

The seeds spent years drifting through space, and are here now to replace the human race with a sterile group conscience. The pod people are indistinguishable from normal people, except for a lack of feeling. They take over the minds of their hosts while they sleep and disintegrate the original body.

With everyone else in Santa Mira already replaced by a pod person and working to spread pods to the outlying towns, Bennell and Becky attempt to stay awake long enough to flee and save humanity.

Directed by Don Siegel, from a screenplay Daniel Mainwaring adapted from the novel by Jack Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not a great film, but it is a classic. It’s been remade in 1978 by Philip Kaufman, who relocated the hysteria to San Francisco, and again by Abel Ferrara in 1993, when the pod people took over an army town. A fourth version - starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig under the title The Visiting - will be released in 2007.

Originally, the film ended with Bennell running down the freeway hollering at motorists “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!!” This is the clip that will play on CNN in retrospective the day after McCarthy passes away and was the perfect doomsday ending. But the producers elected to shoot a prologue and epilogue in the hospital, suggesting that Bennell is successful in alerting the police and G-men to stop the pods.

This was dumb, for one, because any tension over who might not survive immediately dissipates once McCarthy starts narrating the story. The apocalyptic ending is more powerful, indicative of how much better Kaufman’s remake was by going this route.

The script - which Sam Peckinpah claimed he did a major overhaul of - is full of plot holes. At first, the pods need an entire night to take over a body, but later, absorb Dana Wynter in a few minutes. The pod people themselves are quite mild mannered and make good debate points, hardly terrifying. Kaufman’s remake did a much better job showing how cold and remorseless the pod people were, and how scary being duplicated in your sleep would be.

All that aside, Siegel’s version is genius. It has the uncanny ability to appear a work of the right wing, or the left, depending on your politics. Most people assumed it was an allegory on the threat of Communism slowly taking us over; others that it was a commentary on the hysteria generated by Commie witch hunts. Siegel maintained that the story was merely about the loss of individuality in the regimented modern world.

McCarthy and Wynter are both terrific in the flick. Despite all the plot holes and corny narrative gaps, I still enjoyed it. It works as a thought provoking and spooky science fiction, and is certainly a must-see for fans of the 1970s version, or anyone in need for ideas on a term paper.