YMMV / Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Try watching Pleasantville immediately before or after the 1956 version; it's a weird antithesis.
• Applicability: The creators deny any intentional message, but there are two main interpretations of the film:
  • The pod people are Communist infiltrators.
  • The pod people are McCarthyist small-town conformists.
• Narm: Some of Miles's narration crosses over into this, as does the whole OTT "You're next!" scene.
  "I'd been afraid a lot of times in my life, but I didn't know the real meaning of fear until... until I kissed Becky."
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Richard Deacon, later The Dick Van Dyke Show's Mel Cooley, is Dr. Bassett in the framing story.
  • That suspicious gas meter-reader who Miles and Becky find in the basement? He's played by Sam Peckinpah, who later directed such films as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs (1971).
• Spiritual Adaptation: Of Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Puppet Masters. While this is true of all versions of the story, it's especially applicable here given that a popular interpretation of the film is that the aliens are a metaphor for communism — a metaphor that Heinlein made explicit in his novel.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The star and the director repeatedly insisted that they were all just making a sci-fi movie, not a social commentary. It's a somewhat downplayed case, as director Don Siegel noted that the interpretations of allegories about McCarthyism and communism alike were inescapable, but he insisted that his primary intention with the film was to entertain:
  I felt that this was a very important story. I think that the world is populated by pods and I wanted to show them. I think so many people have no feeling about cultural things, no feeling of pain, of sorrow. [...] The political reference to Senator McCarthy and totalitarianism was inescapable but I tried not to emphasize it because I feel that motion pictures are primarily to entertain and I did not want to preach.

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