Them! (1954)

 

If you’re going to make a successful movie about giant ants, those ants need to look realistic. One of the strengths of Them! is that, even by today’s standards for special effects, its ants are pretty large and scary—just as they should be. We don’t actually see these ants until almost thirty minutes into the film, but we hear their rather crazy, eerie sound the first time just ten minutes into the action. It’s as distinctive and foreboding as the John Williams da-dum that announces the impending arrival of the shark in Jaws. The film opens with a sequence of haunting mysteries: a little girl wandering in the New Mexico desert, an abandoned car and trailer destroyed from the inside, and a store that’s also been destroyed, its owner found dead beneath the store. A New Mexico state police sergeant, Ben Peterson (James Whitmore), begins the investigation; he’s quickly joined by James Arness as FBI investigator Robert (Bob) Graham and the two Dr. Medfords, both of them apparently insect experts. The older doctor is played by Edmund Gwenn, forever to be known as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34^th Street but here sort of doddering about while his daughter, Patricia (Pat) does much of the heavy lifting. Dad gets to show a movie about ants to military and government officials, describing ants in very militaristic terms: “savage, ruthless, courageous fighters.” Pat, however, gets to go down into the ants’ nest in the desert after putting Bob in his sexist place when he says that women shouldn’t take on dangerous tasks: “Look, Bob, there’s no time to give you a fast course in insect pathology, so let’s stop all the talk and get on with it.” It’s good to see a bit of feminist sensibility shine through one of the many entries in the radiated-creature genre of the 1950s. The film begins in Alamogordo, the area near the nuclear testing site of White Plains, New Mexico, so it taps into the fears of the time: the lingering effects of radiation from atomic tests and a more general fear of the atomic age and bombs. The climactic scenes of the film take place in the storm drains of the Los Angeles River where two little boys have disappeared after their father was killed by the ants. There is a lot of fire and bullets to take down the giant ants. Them! features Fess Parker, later to become famous starring as Davey Crockett on television, in a small but pivotal role as a pilot who saw the ant queens flying near Brownsville, Texas, and is now under psychiatric observation because his story sounds so crazy. Dub Taylor also shows up, uncredited, as a night watchman who somehow missed seeing a bunch of giant ants stealing forty tons of sugar from a railroad car. The fun of watching movies like this now, apart from seeing how bizarrely Cold War era fears manifested themselves in Hollywood films, is seeing the creatures attack. While one of the highlights is certainly seeing enormous carnivorous ants aboard a navy ship, crushing sailors with their mandibles, nothing quite compares to the image of an enormous ant climbing out of a hole in the desert with a human ribcage in its mandibles. It’s moments like that we tend to enjoy most in movies like this.

Oscar Nomination: Best Special Effects