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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 film)

1956 film directed by Don Siegel

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 science fiction film about a small town doctor who learns that the population of his community is being replaced by alien duplicates.

At first glance, everything looked the same. It wasn't. Something evil had taken possession of the town.
Directed by Don Siegel. Written by Daniel Mainwaring, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (originally serialized in Colliers Magazine in 1954).
They come from another world! Taglines
See also:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 film)

Dr. Miles Bennell

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Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.
 
Look, you fools, you're in danger! Can't you see?! They're after you! They're after all of us!
  • [voiceover] It started — for me, it started — last Thursday, in response to an urgent message from my nurse, I hurried home from a medical convention I'd been attending. At first glance, everything looked the same. It wasn't. Something evil had taken possession of the town.
  • [discovering that Becky is also divorced] Well, I guess that makes us lodge brothers now...except that I'm paying dues while you collect them.
  • [voiceover] Sick people who couldn't wait to see me, then suddenly were perfectly all right. A boy who said his mother wasn't his mother. A woman who said her uncle wasn't her uncle.
  • [voiceover] Driving home, I had a lot of questions and no answers. How could Jimmy and Wilma seem so normal now? Surely I had done nothing to cure them. Maybe they wanted me to feel secure, but why?
  • 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.
  • Keep your eyes a little wide and blank. Show no interest or excitement.
  • 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 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. My only hope was to get away from Santa Mira, to get to the highway, to warn the others of what was happening!
  • Help! Wait! Stop! Stop and listen to me!... These people who're coming after me are not human!
  • Look, you fools, you're in danger! Can't you see?! They're after you! They're after all of us! Our wives, our children, everyone! THEY'RE HERE, ALREADY! YOU'RE NEXT!
  • Don't just sit there measuring me for a straightjacket, do something! Call for help! Oh, what's the use?!
  • Doctor, will you tell these fools? I'm not crazy. Make them listen to me before it's too late.

Becky Driscoll

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I want to love and be loved. I want your children. I don't want a world without love or grief or beauty.
  • You know her uncle, Uncle Ira?...Well Miles, she's got herself thinking he isn't her uncle. She thinks he's an imposter or something.
  • They're like huge seed pods!

Dr. Dan 'Danny' Kauffman

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  • The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it will ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe. Everything except itself.

Jack Belicec

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  • [describing a body he found] It's like the first impression that's stamped on a coin. It isn't finished.

Dialogue

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Dr. Bassett: Oh, Doctor Hill.
Dr. Hill: Dr. Basset. Well, where's the patient?
Dr. Bassett: I hated to drag you out of bed at this time of night. You'll soon see why I did.
Miles: What's the matter with them?
Sally: They wouldn't say. You know, usually people can't talk enough about what's ailing them.
Dr. Kauffman: A strange neurosis, evidently contagious, an epidemic mass hysteria. In two weeks, it spread all over town.
Miles: What causes it?
Dr. Kauffman: Worry about what's going on in the world probably.
Miles: This is the oddest thing I've ever heard of. Let's hope we don't catch it. I'd hate to wake up some morning and find out that you weren't you.
Becky: [laughs] I'm not the high school kid you used to romance, so how can you tell?
Miles: You really want to know?
Becky: Mmm-hmm.
Miles: [after kissing her] Mmmm, you're Becky Driscoll, all right!
Becky: Is this an example of your bedside manner, doctor?
Miles: No, ma'am. That comes later.
Jack: Stop trying to rationalize everything, will ya? Let's face it, we have a mystery on our hands!
Dr. Kauffman: Sure you have. A real one! Whose body was it and where is it now? A completely normal mystery. Whatever it is, it's well within the bounds of human experience and I don't think you ought to make any more of it.
Miles: Look, I wouldn't if I hadn't looked in Becky's cellar! How do you explain away the body I saw there?
Dr. Kauffman: I don't think you saw one there.
Miles: You don't think I saw one here either?
Dr. Kauffman: I know you did because three others saw it too.
Miles: But I dreamed up the second one?
Dr. Kauffman: Doctors can have hallucinations too.
Jack: What are you going to do?
Miles: Get help. I hope whatever's taking place is confined to Santa Mira! [picks up the phone] Operator. This is Dr. Bennell. This is an emergency. I want to talk to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Los Angeles.
Becky: Can you convince them?
Miles: I've got to.
Becky: Where did they come from?
Miles: So much has been discovered these past few years. Anything is possible. Maybe the results of atomic radiation on plant life or animal life...some weird alien organism, a mutation of some kind.
Becky: Why should they take the form of people--of us?
Miles: I don't know. Whatever it is...whatever intelligence or instinct it is that can govern the forming of human flesh and blood out of thin air is...well, it's fantastically powerful, beyond any comprehension, malignant. All that body in your cellar needed was a mind, and it was...
Becky: And it was taking mine while I was asleep.
Dr. Kauffman: We can't let you go. You're dangerous to us.
Jack: Don't fight it, Miles, it's no use. Sooner or later, you'll have to go to sleep.
Dr. Kauffman: Miles, you and I are scientific men. You can understand the wonder of what’s happening. Now just think, less than a month ago, Santa Mira was like any other town. People with nothing but problems. Then, out of the sky came a solution. Seeds drifting through space for years took root in a farmer's field. From the seeds came pods which had the power to reproduce themselves in the exact likeness of any form of life.
Miles: So that's how it began...out of the sky.
Dr. Kauffman: Your new bodies are growing in there. They're taking you over cell for cell, atom for atom. There is no pain. Suddenly, while you're asleep, they'll absorb your minds, your memories and you're reborn into an untroubled world.
Miles: Where everyone's the same?
Dr. Kauffman: Exactly.
Miles: What a world. We're not the last humans left. They'll destroy you!
Dr. Kauffman: Tomorrow you won't want them to. Tomorrow you'll be one of us.
Miles: I love Becky. Tomorrow will I feel the same?
Dr. Kauffman: [shakes his head] There's no need for love.
Miles: No emotion? Then you have no feelings, only the instinct to survive. You can't love or be loved! Am I right?
Dr. Kauffman: You say it as if it were terrible. Believe me, it isn't. You've been in love before. It didn't last. It never does. Love. Desire. Ambition. Faith. Without them, life is so simple, believe me.
Miles: I don't want any part of it.
Dr. Kauffman: You're forgetting something, Miles.
Miles: What's that?
Dr. Kauffman: You have no choice.
Becky: I want to love and be loved. I want your children. I don't want a world without love or grief or beauty. I'd rather die.
Miles: No, no, not unless there's no other choice.
Becky: Oh why didn't they give us a shot or sleeping pills?
Miles: Drugs dull the mind. Maybe that's the reason.
Becky: [after waking up] I went to sleep, Miles, and it happened.
Miles: Oh, Becky.
Becky: They were right.
Miles: I should have never left you.
Becky: Stop acting like a fool, Miles, and accept us!
Miles: No. Never! [runs away]
Becky: He's in here, he's in here. Get him! Get him!
Ambulance Driver: We had to dig him out from under the most peculiar things I ever saw.
Dr. Hill: What things?
Ambulance Driver: Well, I don't know what they are, I never saw them before. They looked like great big seed pods.
Dr. Hill: Where was the truck coming from?
Ambulance Driver: Santa Mira.
Dr. Hill: Get on your radios and sound an all points alarm. Block all highways, stop all traffic, and call every law enforcement agency in the state! [on phone] Operator, get me the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes, it's an emergency!

Taglines

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  • They come from another world!
  • YOU'RE NEXT!
  • There was nothing to hold onto — except each other.
  • Incredible! Invisible! Insatiable!

Cast

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