Them! (1954) – Review

“When Man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we’ll eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.” It was these chilling words that closed out the 1954 classic science-fiction film Them! and set the tone for many such films to follow, a genre filled with nuclear-created monstrosities who would dominate the 50s. The first example of this would be the Ray Harryhausen film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, where an atom bomb test in the Arctic awakens a prehistoric beast, a very cranky dinosaur with irradiated blood, but it was a year later that we got the first true “atomic mutation” in the form of the giant ants in Them!

Of all the atomic B-Movies produced over the years, I find Gordon Douglas’s Them! to be one of the best examples of the genre as the film never once diverted into the "campy territory" that many films succumb to and the first quarter of Them! works as great police procedural and not a monster movie. The movie opens with New Mexico State policemen Sgt. Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) and Trooper Ed Blackburn (Christian Drake) discovering a little girl (Sandy Descher) wandering the desert in a catatonic state, and later they find her family’s vacation trailer destroyed by some unknown attacker but there is no sign of her parents. At a nearby general store, similar destruction and carnage are found along with the broken corpse of the owner, then things take a turn for the worse when Trooper Blackburn is left behind to secure the scene and has a personal encounter with our mysterious foe, one that is decidedly fatal.

 Safety Tip: If you hear strange pulsating sounds in the dark, it’s probably best not to investigate it on your own.

It’s the mystery aspect that makes this film stand out from many of its contemporaries and much of that comes from the demeanour and the acting of the primary cast members, not a soul can be found winking at the camera as everyone on hand to investigate these bizarre attacks takes things with deadpan seriousness. We get James Whitmore as the aforementioned no-nonsense State Trooper and he is then joined by FBI Special Agent Robert Graham (James Arness), Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn), and his daughter, Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon) who all work together to unravel the horrifying mystery that is unfolding in the New Mexico desert. Edmund Gwenn is particularly good as a driven scientist who is so unsettled by the possibilities of what is happening that he is reticent to even share his theories with Graham or Peterson – that is until the title creature makes its first on-screen appearance.

 

These things would seriously ruin a picnic.

Unfortunately, being a product of the 50s even a movie about giant insects couldn’t escape the sexism of the time, so as heroic and stalwart Graham and Peterson appear when facing off against monstrous ants, their attitude towards a pretty face is less than stellar and resulted in this rather dubious exchange:

Robert Graham: “I shoulda had this suit pressed.”
Police Sgt. Ben Peterson: “She's quite a doctor, huh?”
Robert Graham: “Yeah. If she's the kind that takes care of sick people, I think I'll get a fever real quick.”

 

“Who knew women could be doctors?"

It should be noted that this film, at least, didn't bother to introduce any sort of love story to the proceedings and neither Arness nor Whitmore rides off into the sunset with Joan Weldon. In fact, the film surprised me by killing off James Whitmore at the end – while he was heroically saving two children from the giant ants – which normally would have paved the way for Arness to win the girl, but when the end credits roll there is no suggestion that the FBI agent and the scientist will be getting together. So, even though this film has less than a progressive attitude towards the fairer sex that particular failure does not permeate the film to any significant degree, and thus, the bulk of the film rightfully spends most of its time trying to solve the ant problem and not their sex lives.

 

And it is a pretty big ant problem.

The only issue I have with the ants as depicted in this film is that with only three full-scale puppets to create the army of giant ants, we never get a true sense of the scale of the threat. We do get some terrifying scenes of our protagonists entering the various nests, flamethrowers-a-blazing, where they encounter these insect menaces, but if the film had been budgeted to use Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation technique, we could have been treated to some truly amazing scenes of dozens of ants mobilized against our heroes. That all said, I must state the ant puppets created by prop man Richard Smith and special effects master Ralph Ayres were still quite impressive as their waving antennae and gnashing mandibles were very effective, and one can say that they also added a bit of cheesy charm to the otherwise grim proceedings.

 

Note: If you are familiar with this 1950s’ science-fiction monster feature, and have also seen James Cameron’s sci-fi action masterpiece Aliens, a few similarities can leave you wondering if Cameron was also a huge fan of Them!

• Both films feature a young girl found by the heroes, a little girl who has lost her family and gone mute due to her shocking encounter with the giant insects.
• In Aliens, the monsters are more insect-like in nature than as depicted in the Ridley Scott original.
• Both films deal with a queen, workers, and warrior drones, though Them! has the bonus of having two queens.
• Both the xenomorphs and the ants use secreted resin to form their nests.
• An egg chamber is featured in both films.
• The military is sent into the nest with flamethrowers to engage the insect threat.
• Both films end with the rescue of children from the center of the nest/hive.

 

Sigourney Weaver definitely had better luck than James Whitmore.

There were many giant insect films that followed Them! yet it still remains one of the best examples of the genre. Such films as 1955’s Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis from 1957 certainly continued the legacy of science causing monstrous insects to go on the rampage, but none of them had that element of realism that director Gordon Douglas was able to imbue into his film. If you somehow come across this film during a Saturday afternoon matinee, I do recommend tracking it down; you won’t be disappointed.

Science Note: The reason you won’t find giant ants in your backyard has to do with a bottleneck that occurs in insects’ air pipes as they become humongous. Simply put, ants don’t possess lungs, the air is circulated through their bodies by air pressure alone via a number of holes on each side of the thorax, which is an effective method in small bodies but not sufficient to oxygenate an animal the size we get in Them!