Them! is one of the first of the 1950s "nuclear monster" movies, and the first with big bugs
as the threat. A nest of gigantic irradiatedants is discovered in the New Mexico desert; they quickly become a national threat when it is discovered that two young queens and their consorts have escaped to establish new nests. The national search that follows culminates in a battle with the last surviving colony in the concrete spillways and storm drain system of Los Angeles.
Plot
In 1954, New Mexico State Police Sgt. Ben Peterson and his partner, Ed Blackburn, discover a little girl wandering the desert in a catatonic state near Alamogordo. Shortly after they discover a ravaged travel trailer with its owners missing. They summon an ambulance for the girl then search for clues indicating what may have happened.
Later that night at a rural general store the officers find it destroyed in the same way the trailer was and its mutilated owner dead, killed fending off some sort of vicious attack. In each case no money had been taken. Peterson leaves Blackburn behind to secure the crime scene. Upon hearing a strange, pulsating sound outside, Blackburn goes to investigate and disappears.
FBI Agent Robert Graham arrives to investigate. Shortly after myrmecologist Phd’s Harold Medford and his daughter Pat are sent by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to lend assistance. On an educated hunch, Medford exposes the little girl to formic acid fumes, characteristic of ants. The odor releases her from her catatonia, leaving her shrieking in panic, "Them! Them!"
Peterson accompanies Graham and the Medfords to where the girl was first discovered. There Pat is accosted by a giant foraging ant. Following Medford's orders, Peterson and Graham shoot off the ant's antennae, to blind it, then kill it with a Thompson submachine gun. Medford theorizes that the giant ants mutated by radiation from the first atomic bomb test near Alamogordo, and have turned carnivorous from lack of a suitable food supply in the desert.
A helicopter search ensues, and a cave-sized ant nest is found. Cyanide gas bombs are tossed inside before Graham, Peterson, and Pat check for survivors. Inside, the trio are attacked by surviving guard ants, which they dispatch with flamethrower and Thompson before Pat finds evidence that two queens have hatched and escaped to establish new colonies. With the possibility that each could grow to thousands of ants apiece and spawn thousands more nests, Dr. Medford announces that mankind may become extinct within a year if the new winged queens aren’t found and eradicated.
A worldwide search is begun. One queen and its offspring are discovered aboard a freighter in mid-ocean out of Acapulco, which savagely attacked its crew. A handful of crewmen are rescued from the water and the freighter is sunk by U.S. naval gunfire.
Graham and Pat then travel to Brownsville, Texas, to interrogate a civilian pilot, committed to a mental hospital after claiming he was forced down by UFOs shaped like giant ants. A later report sends the investigators west to a Los Angeles hospital, where a chronic alcoholic claims he has seen giant ants in the city’s storm drain system. The mutilated body of a man is shortly found nearby, but his two young sons remain missing.
Martial law is declared and a curfew imposed. With help from Graham, the Medfords, and the armed forces, Peterson searches inside the cavernous drain network for the two boys. He finds them trapped by the ants near their nest. He calls for reinforcements and lifts the boys to safety, just before being attacked and killed by a giant ant. Graham arrives with backup, and they find the remaining queen and her hatchlings. The Medfords confirm that no new queens have gotten away and sanction their destruction. The senior Dr. Medford muses on the possible consequences of the decade of atomic tests already carried out since the firing of the Trinity atomic bomb.
When casting his planned Davy Crockett episode of the Disneyland television series, Walt Disney viewed the film to see James Arness, who had been recommended for the role. Disney, however, was more impressed by a scene with Fess Parker as an inmate in the mental ward of the Texas hospital. Watching Parker's performance, Disney realized he had found his Davy Crockett.[5]John Wayne saw the film and, impressed with Arness' performance, recommended him for the role of Marshal Matt Dillon in the new Gunsmoke TV series, a role that Arness went on to play from 1955 to 1975.[4]
Production
Opening title card with the background in black and white and Them! in red and blue
When Them! began production in the fall of 1953, it was originally conceived to be in 3D and Warner Color. During pre-production, test shots in color and 3D were made. A few color tests of the large-scale ant models were also made, but when it was time to shoot the 3D test, Warner Bros.' "All Media" 3D camera rig malfunctioned and no footage could be filmed. The next day a memo was sent out that the color and 3D aspects of the production were to be scrapped; widescreen black-and-white would now be the film's presentation format. Warner Bros. hoped to emulate the "effective shock treatment" effect of its previous science fiction thriller The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms; ultimately, however, the film was never made in widescreen. Because of the preparation of certain scenes, many of the camera set-ups for 3D remain in the film, like the opening titles and the flamethrowers shots aimed directly at the camera.[6]
Although Warner Bros. was dissatisfied with the color results, the film's titles were printed in vivid red and blue against a black-and-white background to give the film's opening a dramatic "punch". This effect was achieved by an Eastman Color section spliced into each release print.[4] The 1985 VHS tape release, the subsequent LaserDisc and later DVD release have retained this black-and-white-with-two-color title effect.[citation needed]
The entrance to the ants' final nest was filmed along the concrete spillways of the Los Angeles River, between the First and Seventh Street Bridges, east of downtown. The depiction of the Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico is actually the Mojave Desert near Palmdale, California. Mercy Hospital was a real institution and is now Brownsville Medical Center.[4]
James Whitmore wore "lifts" in his shoes to compensate for the height difference between himself and James Arness. Whitmore also employed bits of "business" (hand gestures and motions) during scenes in which he appeared to draw more attention to his character when not speaking.[4]
The Wilhelm scream, created three years earlier for the film Distant Drums, is used during the action sequences: when a sailor aboard the freighter is grabbed by an ant, when James Whitmore's character is caught in an ant's mandibles, and when an overhead wooden beam falls on a soldier in the Los Angeles storm drain sequence.[4]
The giant ants, painted a purplish-green color, were constructed and operated by unseen technicians supervised by Ralph Ayers. During the climactic battle sequence in the Los Angeles sewers, there is a brief shot of one ant moving in the foreground with its side removed, revealing its mechanical interior.[4] This filming error was obscured on the DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film.[citation needed]
The film poster shows a gigantic ant with menacing cat-like eyes rather than the normal compound eyes of an ant.
Them! was released in June 1954,[4] and by the end of that year had accrued $2.2 million (US) in distributors' domestic (U.S. and Canada) rentals, making it the year's 51st biggest earner.[2][8][Note 1]
Reviews
A. H. Weiler's review in The New York Times noted "... from the moment James Whitmore, playing a New Mexico state trooper, discovers a six-year-old moppet wandering around the desert in a state of shock, to the time when the cause of that mental trauma is traced and destroyed, Them! is taut science fiction".[9]
The reviewer in Variety stated it was a "top-notch science fiction shocker. It has a well-plotted story, expertly directed and acted in a matter-of-fact style to rate a chiller payoff and thoroughly satisfy the fans of hackle-raising melodrama".[10][11]
John McCarten of The New Yorker wrote, "If you're willing to let your imagination off its leash, you may have a fairly good time at 'Them!'"[12]
The contemporary Monthly Film Bulletin stated that despite the science fiction film genre being new it had developed several sub-divisions including "the other-worldly, the primeval-monstrous, the neo-monstrous, the planetary-visitant, etc." and that "Them! is a "well-built example of the neo-monstrous", "less absurdly sensational than most"[13] Discussing the ant monsters in the film, the review referred to them as "reasonably horrible--they do not entirely avoid the impression of mock-up that is almost inevitable when over-lifesize creatures have to be constructed and moved" while noting that they were "considerably more conceivable than those prehistoric remnants that have recently been emerging from bog and iceberg".[13] The review commented on the cast as "like most science-fiction, [the film] is on the whole serviceably rather than excitingly cast" and the crew was noted, stating the direction was "smoothly machined" and the film has "decent writing" though "more short cuts might have been [taken]", finding that the start of the film was too slow.[13]
Since its original release, Them! has become generally regarded as one of the best science fiction films of the 1950s. Bill Warren described it as " ... tight, fast-paced and credible ... [T]he picture is suspenseful".[4]Phil Hardy's The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction noted, "Directed by [Gordon] Douglas in semi-documentary fashion, Them! is one of the best American science fiction films of the fifties".[14]Danny Peary believed the film "Ranks with The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers as the best of the countless '50s science fiction films".[15] In the Time Out Film Guide, David Pirie wrote, "By far the best of the 50s cycle of 'creature features' ... retains a good part of its power today".[16] The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 93% approval rating as of September 2021, with an average rating of 7.6/10, based on 57 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "One of the best creature features of the early atomic age, Them! features effectively menacing special effects and avoids the self-parody that would taint later monster movies".[17]
Fallout 3, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic irradiated wasteland, has a side-quest involving giant mutated fire ants titled "Those!" in homage to the film.[23]
^"Rentals" refers to the distributor/studio's share of the box office gross, which, according to Gebert, is roughly half of the money generated by ticket sales.[8]
References
^"Them! - Details". AFI Catalog of Feature Films. Retrieved June 23, 2018.
^ abGebert, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Movie Awards (listing of "Box Office (Domestic Rentals)" for 1954, taken from Variety magazine). New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1996. ISBN0-668-05308-9.
^"Brog". Review from Variety dated April 14, 1954, taken from Variety's Complete Science Fiction Reviews, edited by Don Willis, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985, ISBN0-8240-6263-9.
Herzberg, Bob (2007). The FBI and the Movies. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. ISBN978-0-78642-755-0.
Parish, James Robert; Pitts, Michael R. (1977). The Great Science Fiction Pictures. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. ISBN978-0-81081-029-7.
Smith, Dave (2012). Disney Trivia from the Vault: Secrets Revealed and Questions Answered. New York: Disney Press. ISBN978-1-4231-7857-6.
Warren, Bill (1982). Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, Vol. 1: 1950-1957. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. ISBN0-89950-032-3.
