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THEM!

In 1945, the United States decimated Hiroshima and we've been dealing with nuclear annihilation anxiety ever since. In the following decade, a series of films began to emerge that dealt with those fears in a fantasy setting, allowing the audiences to vent those anxieties and overcome those fears safely. These films often involved scientists who have gone too far or projects that have wrought unexpected consequences. Much loss of life ensued. But, at the end, everything was made right again through kindness, virtue, responsible science and the sheer force of the human will. The ultimate lesson in many of these films was that science should be both respected and feared and that, in times of great panic, cooler heads will always prevail. All the while, "Duck and Cover!" exercises were being presented in schools and paranoia was building in the streets. And who can blame them for being fearful? Anyone who has seen footage or photographs of the Hiroshima aftermath instantly realizes that the fear of nuclear attack is wholly justified. Those who die in the blast are the lucky ones. The slow, painful death from radiation sickness or severe burns and infection is a fate I wouldn't wish upon anyone. In some small way, these films provided a good, useful service to people. Fear can be crippling and without some way of releasing our fears, we would find it hard to walk out of the front door every morning, let alone crawl out of bed.

THEM!, directed by Gordon Douglas and released in 1954, was one of the first "Giant Bug" movies released in the States. It would initiate a wave of them, including TARANTULA (1955), DEADLY MANTIS (1957), BLACK SCORPION (1957), THE BEGINNING OF THE END (1957) and EARTH VS. THE SPIDER (1958). THEM! was a box office smash and a - surprisingly - hit with the critics. Though THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS got the "bigger is better" craze going a year earlier, THEM! helped turned the "atomic monstrosity" film into a bankable commodity. But does it hold up today? First a bit of a rundown:

We open in New Mexico. A Police Sergeant, Ben Peterson, is investigating the disappearance of an FBI agent and his wife after finding their little girl wandering through the desert in a state of shock. When they visit the trailer owned by the family, they find it torn to pieces. The only clue is a strange animal track in the dirt. They make a plaster cast of the track and send it in for analysis. It isn't much later that they find a store owner dead in his similarly ransacked store. A FBI agent, Robert Graham, is sent in to assist in the investigation but so far they have no leads. To make matters worse, no one at the FBI can identify the animal that left the disturbingly large track at the crime scene.

After the FBI sends the track off to be analyzed by the Department of Agriculture, Doctors Harold and Pat Medford, a father/daughter team of entomologists arrive on the scene with a rather bizarre theory. After reviving the catatonic girl with a vial of formic acid - causing the girl to go into a blind panic, screaming "them! them!" over and over - the team heads off to the scene of the crime to look for more tracks. What they find instead is a giant ant, the byproduct of atomic radiation that seeped into the ground during the first nuclear bomb tests conducted in the empty desert. Fearing the worst, The Doctors Metford lead a hunting party. Their quarry: the site of the ant colony. With the help of the military, they make quick work of the giant ants. Unfortunately for everyone involved, they arrived too late. Several queens have hatched and flown the coup. Now the race is on to eliminate the queens before they can breed, a catastrophic event that would inevitably lead to the extinction of the human race.

THEM! is still a lot of fun and even manages to be a little creepy at times - had I seen this film back in 1954 I probably would have shit my pants. It is easily one of the best of the bunch with tight direction, whip-smart writing by Ted Sherdeman, and a great cast that includes James Whitmore, James Arness, Joan Weldon, and Edmund Gwenn. It also takes itself very seriously, something most films of this sort clearly didn't. There is no place for comic relief characters in the narrative - the male Doctor Metford comes across as eccentric instead of laughable and there is a difference - and little time is spent developing the standard-issue love story between the male and female leads. THEM! is all business and despite the crude nature of the special effects, it handles its business with a straight face and utter seriousness. The descent into the ant colony in the desert is still a remarkably effective piece of film, as tense as the final confrontation with the alien at the end of THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, a scene which many hold as a classic in the sci-fi b-movie cannon.

While the moral of the story never rises above the superficial "bombs are bad, m'kay?" sort, THEM! addresses the concerns of the atomic age in a mature fashion. It's too late to turn back now, the damage has already been done. THEM! isn't concerned with disarming bombs and shutting down the weapons divisions. It is concerned with preparedness and caution. If the final line of the film - "When man entered the atomic age, he opened the door to a new world. What we eventually find in that new world nobody can predict" - seems to promise more horrors to come, the preceding 91 minutes of the film promises that no matter what the horror may be or how great the threat, mankind can overcome. How comforting that thought must have been in 1954.

And how comforting that thought is today.

Highly recommended.