Our ongoing series reviewing the greatest Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror movies. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
Directed By: Gordon Douglas
Produced By: David Weisbart
Written By: George Worthing Yates (Story) Ted Sherdeman, Russell Hughes (Screenplay)
Starring: James Arness, James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon
Original Release: 1954
Reviewed By: John J. Joex
Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars (Highest Rating)
Synopsis: Two policemen find a young girl wandering alone in the New Mexico desert in a state of shock. They search for her family and find their camper, but it has been ripped apart and they find no one alive. FBI agent Robert Graham (James Arness) arrives to help with the investigation, and they discover a strange animal track near the camper, and they take a mold of this. This prompts two entomologists to join the investigation, the senior Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon). The elder scientist has a theory that the nuclear testing done in the area may have caused ants to mutate to incredibly large sizes, and this proves itself true as several large ants attack them near the site of the camper. They then find the nest and call in an airstrike to fire missiles with poisonous gas and eliminate the threat. They enter the nest to assure that all of ants are dead, but find evidence that two young queens had flown away before the attack. One of these, they discover, had landed on a ship at sea and started a new nest, but it was sunk and all of the creatures destroyed. But another apparently made its way to Los Angeles and has began a nest of its own in the sewers beneath the city. Agent Graham leads a team to that city to destroy the giant ants before they threaten the entire city and beyond.
Review/Commentary: 1954 gave us two of the first and most influential movies to feature monsters mutated from radiation. In Japan, Godzilla assaulted the theaters (and Tokyo) and in the United States we had the giant ants of Them! And while these films presented two very different sides of the same coin, they both offered cautionary tales dealing with the consequences of the nuclear age that struck a nerve with their audiences. And while Godzilla gave us a more straightforward tale of a monster run amok in the countryside and the big city, Them! took a slightly different route.
The movie starts out as a mystery, with the local police officers, Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) and Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake), finding the girl wandering in the desert, then finding her family’s gutted camper which defies any normal explanation. From that, mystery upon mystery follows and we feel the ominous presence of some unseen threat (enhanced by the eerie, unexplained sounds emitted by the off screen ants which come and go). It’s well one third into the movie before we actually see one of the arthropods, but by that time the audience is already glued to the screen and sitting at the edge of their seats because of the build up that has preceded the arrival of the movie’s main attraction. And while this approach may have had some budgetary dictates driving it, it was still a masterful way to draw the audience into the movie and set the foreboding, pre-apocalyptic tone that would carry the film all the way to its end and the final, ominous speech given by the senior Dr. Bedford. This film definitely struck a nerve with its contemporary audience, in part because of the nuclear fears that permeated the nation at that time. But it did not act on the subconscious level as much as another classic from that time, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It succeeded more because it was a very well-written, tightly-directed Science Fiction thriller; something very rare at that time when the genre was considered mostly kiddie matinee fodder.
Of course, you have to take into account the excellent performance by the cast as well. A young James Arness (between his roles as a walking veggie monster in The Thing and his iconic run as Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke) delivered a standout performance as the FBI agent Robert Graham. He offers the film its central, strong lead that keeps the film moving and that the rest of the cast revolves around. But in an unexpected move for the time, he had a strong female lead next to him as well who nearly stole the show. Joan Weldon plays the younger Dr. Medford with a tangible presence felt the moment she first appears onscreen. Far from the helpless female role so common in genre films and offering much more than simple eye candy, Weldon made her mark in what was considered a man’s world at the time and her performance has unfortunately gone mostly unsung as an early strong female character in a sci fi film. The rest of the main cast held their own as well with James Whitmore complementing Arness’ lead role and Edmund Gwenn giving us some good, though less manic, Walter Bishop moments as the elder Dr. Medford. And also watch for a brief appearance by Leonard Nimoy as an army sergeant and Fess Parker as a pilot who had a close encounter with the ants.
And speaking of those six-legged insects, no review would be complete without a mention of their appearance in the film. Special effects were still pretty rudimentary at the time, but the production crew succeeded in creating some of the most memorable movie monsters of all time on the limited budget offered them. They could have gone the stop-motion route or used film of real ants against the blue screen. But instead, they created life size mechanical ants that could interact directly with the actors with no additional visual trickery needed. They built one full-sized ant and had several partial mockups as well. And while the CGI-gorged audiences of today may look at these as quaint examples of the special effects industry in its infancy, I still recall being terrified by them as a child and even today look upon them as first rate movie monsters. Sure, any modern day remake of Them! (and don’t remake this film) would give us thousands if not millions of the arthropods running across the screen. But director Gordon Douglas’ decision to keep them mostly offscreen as an ominous, unseen threat with a few brief glimpses emphasizes their menace that much more.
Them! gave us a superior Science Fiction movie, and not just because of its special effects which were top notch for its time. It delivered a good, riveting story that carried a cautionary tale along with it, which the elder Dr. Medford stated explicitly in his closing monologue. And though this may have been somewhat preachy and melodramatic, a movie could still pull it off at that time. What would now sound pretentious and pedantic came off as foreboding and prophetic in a black and white movie from the 50’s. And while many more movies would try to follow the example of Them! in the years to follow, very few would come anywhere close to this early film that tackled the many hazards of our nuclear ambitions.
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