If you were casting a movie about an alien invasion of Earth, who would play the human hero? One of our musclebound action stars, like Dave Bautista or Jason Statham ? A magazine-cover beauty like Zendaya or Anya Taylor-Joy ? Whatever script you’re working with, it’s unlikely you’d be on the lookout for a mustachioed, soft-spoken, fortysomething man to play a city bureaucrat gradually convinced that everyone around him is being replaced with soulless clones, but it’s this performance by the late Donald Sutherland that makes Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) a masterpiece of creeping dread. Sutherland, who died Thursday at age 88, was an established leading man by the time he appeared in the sci-fi thriller, a remake of the 1956 film based on a serialized novel. To portray San Francisco health inspector Matthew Bennell, however, he had to be a convincing nobody — just another guy cruising around town in a drab trench coat.
Even as he starts to encounter signs of an extraterrestrial species’ secret takeover, he remains a levelheaded voice of reason, trying to calm his panicked friends while searching for viable clues to what’s really happening. The movie wouldn’t be so effective had Sutherland immediately leapt into protagonist mode: it’s the way his unruffled understatement slowly gives way to heightened emotion (the very thing that makes him a target of the dead-eyed pod people) that ratchets up the paranoia until the viewer, like Bennell, is studying ev.
