INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956)
Don Siegel’s black-and-white original, based on Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers, tapped into the vein of paranoia that had begun to grip America in the era of McCarthyism and the panic over Communism. Told in flashback, as Kevin McCarthy recounts a bizarre story of an insidious takeover of America by people who look like us, talk like us, but have deeply disturbing motives, it’s one of the great B movies of the ’50s, down to the iconic ending in which McCarthy has a meltdown in the middle of a traffic jam. Unlike most of the movies and TV shows it inspired, it actually ends on a note of hope.