Anty vs. establishment scary film-ism
Them! begins as a ghost story in the desert: a mute little girl ambles down the dusty road in shock, haunted by some frightening sight she can’t even speak of. Police find her and discover a few miles down the road a camper torn apart in a way that suggests something burst out rather than broke in. The valuables are completely untouched; only the sugar was ransacked. Despite the poster and marketing giving the game away, the movie doesn’t yet share what caused this horror.
The film takes shape from this stark, terrific setup, turning into a creature feature procedural mystery: Detectives and scientists collaborate to piece together what the root of this destruction might be. (Whatever it is, its destructive power has faint echoes of the nuclear testing that took place in that very desert.) Unless you’re a scientist or crossword puzzle enthusiast, the “formic acid” references might not give it away. As the investigators home in on a culprit, they put some of that formic acid under the traumatized girl’s nose. She bolts upright and shouts her first word:
“THEM!”
The big reveal comes a few minutes later with what is genuinely one of my favorite heart-stopping jump-scare moments in the movies. We finally see what “them” are, enormous freaking ants, when one towers over a scientist.
This slow-burn opening is masterpiece B-movie material, brilliant tension and mood-setting. Described from the outside, it may not sound all that different from a Teenagers from Outer Space-type story. The handful of American ‘50s sci-fi I’ve seen shares the earnestness of this, but executed with a junkiness that deflates a sense of danger, rather than the steady hand and clear vision that Them! offers courtesy director Gordon Douglas.
The real star of Them! is investigative, scientific procedure, but here’s a quick intro to the cast partaking in that process: Sgt. Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) is a local cop, and he’s aided by FBI agent Robert Graham (James Arness). They team up with scientist Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon) to identify, contain, and eradicate this peculiar threat in the New Mexico sands. Eventually, they pull in more civilian and military helpers and ant-spotters: an Air Force officer (Sean McClory), a ranch foreman (Fess Parker), and a charismatic alcoholic (Olin Howland).
The film withholds its ants for what feels like ages (really about a third of the film), but when they do arrive, they’re a terrific piece of production with real heft and texture, combining large-scale animatronics, forced perspective, and clever editing to make the creatures huge and terrifying. And when they die, it’s usually by actual fire: flamethrowers torch the creatures to ash.
The film deflates after its miraculously taut opening act in which the crew discovers the ants, and deflates even more when they snuff out the first hive. But we’re barely past the halfway point when this happens, triggering a narrative reset that sucks the film’s momentum just a little. The ants have spread out, though the movie conveniently eliminates all of the hives except the one in the Los Angeles sewer system, meaning the film climaxes with a focused urban battle.
What makes Them! pop is a combination of strong fundamentals in the visual craft and excellent writing. The script is full of sharp commentary evocative of the headlines. Douglas keeps the movie brisk and punchy, never dull. Even when a scene is just briefing-room jargon, the tempo has a clean, forward lean to it. The black-and-white photography is crisp, though I am a little disappointed that Warner Bros balked at its pre-production plan of full-color 3D ants. But it’s Them!’s sound design that really gets under your skin: a high, needling drone always appears before the ants do, priming your nerves so their eventual imposing appearance lands harder.
The movie offers a compelling read of Cold War anxieties. Its main theme, the dangers of nuclear warfare, gets said out loud in no uncertain terms: nukes are identified as the source of the size-altering mutation in the ants. The film ends with a scientist’s monologue about the apocalyptic danger of nuclear weapons and proliferation. That last bit of narration would be tacky if it didn’t provide an effectively somber finale fitting the film’s tone very well. In the film’s second half, the ants also fly, which we only witness through testimony. This evokes flying saucer paranoia, a few years pre-Sputnik. The flying ants are dangers in the sky that are only witnessed and documented by outsiders. The public perceives these UFO-believers as having a screw loose, which the government can exploit to keep the investigation hush-hush.
If Them! has any emotional arc, it’s Sgt. Peterson and co. learning to embrace the human element of their operations, particularly as it relates to saving the children of Mrs. Lodge (Mary Alan Hokanson), who are stuck in LA’s pipes with the jumbo-sized insects. The film’s second half offers some surprisingly nuanced ambivalence about the government manipulating institutions in the name of public safety, steamrolling some ordinary people in their rush to save humanity.
Them! would make an intriguing double-feature with the original Godzilla, which also came out in 1954. Godzilla is an all-time great monster film, and its Japanese view of nuclear terror is very different from Them!’s distinctly American viewpoint. Them! depicts bureaucracy, science, and reasonable but assertive containment saving the day, even if some overreach is required. Compare that to the apocalyptic ruin of Godzilla, and Them! starts to seem a bit tame, operating in the hypothetical “duck and cover” space rather than the experience of seeing your cities burn in an instant that Toho’s film reflected.
In the broad sweep of atomic age creature features, Them! became the quintessential standard-bearer for a reason. It’s a serious and eminently watchable film even 70+ years later, wonderfully and sturdily assembled. Even when it fails to live up to its phenomenal opening, it’s nothing short of great.
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
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4 replies on “Them! (1954)”
Just wanted to pop in and apologise for not having posted in a while – I’m always reluctant to read reviews for films I have not seen, the better to form my own opinions and avoid spoilers – but can only call the mental image of Disney’s “King of the Wild Frontier” (Mr Fess Parker) being confronted by GIANT ANTS a most rewarding return for mere politeness.😄
An ED comment is always welcome, never taken for granted!
It is pretty odd to see Davey Crockett in a supporting role, isn’t it? And this is the year before that movie was made.
That’s a good point about the flying ants that didn’t occur to me. (I, er, stopped at “well, ants do fly, though truck-sized ones could not.”) UFO sightings were certainly already in swing (the Invasion of Washington occurred in 1952), and that’s got to be Cold War related in some way, though Sputnik didn’t happen on the back of an R-7 missile till 1957. And this along with some early “nuclear apocalypse” movies it’s gotten me curious as to the timeline of the Cold War in regards to at what point Americans got it into their heads that nuclear war could kill us all–because I feel like it might be well in advance of the fact, as the USSR had no means of full-scale nuclear strikes on the continental United States (except maybe suicide bombing missions) until about 1960. “Duck and Cover” was produced in 1952! I guess it was “as soon as the Soviets had significant numbers and types of nuclear weapons at all” and I suppose that makes sense, given that appreciation of Soviet capabilities naturally tilted towards worst-case-scenario thinking.
Anyway, this is a really good movie but that reset just to do the first half over again in a different setting puts some hard limits on how good it can be.
Oh man for some reason I thought Sputnik was 1952. Not sure how I got that far off. I should’ve paid closer attention to “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” I guess. I’ve slightly rewritten that section.
Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast was in 1938 so I guess paranoia of alien monsters from the sky has been a latent part of our culture for a long time.