Them! (Warner Bros., 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Dr. Strangelove Turner Classic Movies followed up their Hallowe’en programming with something far more typical of “horror” fare: Them!, a 1954 production from Warner Bros. and David Weisbart (who would produce Rebel Without a Cause a year later) starring James Whitmore and James Arness as law-enforcement officers (Whitmore as New Mexico cop Sgt. Ben Peterson and Arness, a year before his debut as Marshal Matt Dillon in the long-running Gunsmoke, as government agent Robert Graham) who find themselves leading a campaign to exterminate a race of giant ants that resulted when normal-sized ants mutated from the atomic radiation created by the first nuclear explosion, the “Trinity” atomic-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1945. The ants run from nine to 12 feet long and have the same sexual division of labor as real ants (or insects generally): their colonies are led by queen ants, most of the labor is done by female worker ants, and the males, called “drones,” are there only to fuck the female once and then die.

All this is explained to us by the scientist character Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn, who’d played a super-scientist before in the 1936 Warners horror film The Walking Dead, in which he revives Boris Karloff who’s been executed for a crime he didn’t commit, only Karloff becomes a revenge machine bent on killing all the people who framed him; most of us, though, remember him as Santa Claus in the original 1947 Miracle on 34th Street, and it’s a little weird to hear Santa Claus deliver lectures on entomology), who brings along his daughter, Patricia Medford (Joan Weldon), as his assistant. There’s the usual “this is no job for a woman” crap she has to deal with as she insists on entering the cave where the giant ants are living -- she explains that her dad isn’t physically strong enough to do it and she’s the only other person there with the scientific expertise needed to figure out what’s going on -- but there’s no hint of a romantic or sexual interest between her and any of the men.

Though Them! wasn’t the first of the giant-monster-loosed-on-the-world-by-nuclear-radiation movies, it’s one of the better ones; it may have had a low production budget but it at least had a major-studio infrastructure instead of the catch-as-catch-can production values of American International and the other small companies that made these sorts of things. It also had competent acting -- even though all the actors playing law-enforcement officials seem to have graduated from the Jack Webb School of Underplaying a Cop -- and an unusually well-constructed script by George Worthing Yates, Russell Hughes and Ted Sherderman that set the template for a lot of later “bugs” movies. There’s a long, relatively slow exposition and effective suspense direction by Gordon Douglas before the movie first starts to show us the giant ants on the rampage, after which (like the original King Kong) it becomes more or less a succession of action set-pieces culminating in a confrontation in a sewer still under construction under what’s left of the Los Angeles River. There’s also real pathos in the character of a mother, Mrs. Lodge (Mary Ann Hokanson), whose husband was killed by the giant ants as he had taken their two sons out to play in the dry, paved-over riverbed and who’s broken-hearted not only by his loss but anxiety over the fate of her kids (who, predictably, turn up alive and are rescued -- though barely -- by the people who’ve descended into the sewer to kill the ants).

Though only two giant-monster movies ever achieved real greatness -- the original 1933 King Kong and the original 1954 Japanese film Gojira (not the version we got two years later as Godzilla, with virtually all the non-monster dramatic content cut out and replaced by new and cheaply-shot footage featuring Raymond Burr; Gojira, which we in the U.S. didn’t get to see until 2004, is a masterpiece that intensely expresses Japan’s nationwide post-traumatic stress disorder at being the first country ever on the receiving end of a nuclear attack) -- Them! is quite good entertainment, able to make us suspend disbelief despite its scientifically ridiculous premise (no creature on earth with an outside skeleton can be longer than 18 inches or so because if they got any bigger than that, earth’s gravity would pull their internal organs off the outside skeleton -- and the largest exoskeletal creatures, lobsters and crabs, solve that problem by living most of their lives under water, where their buoyancy partly counteracts the effect of gravity) and refreshing in that unlike in other contemporary monster movies, the scientist agrees with the military that the creature needs to be killed instead of pleading with the authorities to keep it alive for research and/or to try to communicate with it (as happened in James Arness’s other science-fiction horror classic, The Thing, from 1951).

TCM host Ben Mankiewicz warned us that the special effects wouldn’t be as good as they’d be in a version of this premise made today, post-CGI, and he made the surprising claim that instead of using miniature models and stop-motion photography to represent the giant ants, they built two full-sized models, one complete and one partial, and needed up to 20 people off-set to work them. The effects are quite convincing, though that may be one of the reasons this film is in black-and-white (albeit with one splash of color -- the title is blood-red against a black-and-white backdrop): because these kinds of effects, especially the composite shots needed to have the monsters interact on screen with human beings, were considerably easier in 1954 to do in black-and-white than in color.