Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
While Japan was dealing with the aftermath of having nuclear bombs dropped on them, even before the full onset of the Cold War and the shadow of mutually assured destruction there was concern in America about the responsibility of opening the atomic edition of Pandora’s Box.
Thus, Them! also released in 1954, where James Whitmore’s New Mexico Police Sgt. Ben Peterson is tasked with figuring out what’s caused a trail of destruction and death out in the desert, including a holidaying FBI man. This beings James Arness’ Special Agent Robert Graham on board and before long, for reasons unclear to the detectives but transparent to an audience that’s seen the poster, myrmecologists Edmund Gwenn’s Dr. Harold Medford and his daughter, Joan Weldon’s Dr. Pat Medford.
At the risk of shortcutting this a bit too radically, they work out that the trouble is being caused by ants of unusual size, which brings with it unusual strength and ferocity. Thanks, Oppenheimer! Now you have become Death, maker of large ants. The authorities work quickly to eradicate this threat, but discover that two new queens have already flown the nest, and so begins a race against time to track down and destroy them before humanity is supplanted as the dominant species, ending, as things so often do, in a Los Angeles storm drain.
This was a massive success for Warner Bros. on release, and I want to say up front that I did quite enjoy watching this, but it is hard to check the decades long accumulation of creature feature genre baggage at the door and take this entirely at face value. I mean, it’s only a couple of decades later that this and its genre-mates have been parodied out of existence by the likes of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and replaced in the cinemas by disaster films. Which is ironic, as most disaster films follow fairly similar action and pacing pathways as these films, just replacing the giant ants of whatever with fire, or water, or just bees of a normal size.
Anyway, a lot of Them! is not about taking a flamethrower to a delightfully chintzy toy ant, or knocking over even more delightful toy vehicles, and is instead something more akin to a criminal manhunt headed by David Attenborough, and you know what, I’m here for it. It’s refreshing to see this played entirely straight, and with the obvious exception of the Oscar nominated special effects, and scientific understanding of radiation on DNA, it doesn’t feel all that dated.
Well, okay, it does, but not in a bad way, and it even avoids later developed tropes such as the needlessly obstructive superior officer not allowing something just to inject a bit of human drama into it. Is it essential viewing in space year 2021? While the continued endurance of Godzilla makes viewing the original a worthwhile historical exercise, the Western arm of creature features has long been dead, excepting King Kong of course. Still, it’s nice to see what, arguable, launched a thousand imitators and popularised and normalised the subgenre so much that it eventually burned out. It’s an easy, breezy watch that doesn’t outstay its welcome. Go for it.