WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951) Better get the hell out of town

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE features below-average special effects, even for the '50s, but for me, the story is top-notch and not totally implausible. When astronomers calculate one planet will pass close enough to the Earth to cause havoc on land and sea, and then a few days later a second will make a direct hit, they set to building a rocket so that a few selected individuals can hightail to a distant Earth-like world. John Hoyt, a character actor whose face, if not name, you'll recognize, plays an egomaniacal millionaire who tries to buy his way aboard the space ark - and Barbara Rush, who two years later would brush with body-borrowing aliens in IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953), is the plucky heroine.