Them! **** (1954, James Whitmore, Joan Weldon, James Arness, Edmund Gwenn, Onslow Stevens, Fess Parker, William Schallert, Dub Taylor, Leonard Nimoy) – Classic Movie Review 3720

Director Gordon Douglas’s vintage 1954 sci-fi horror thriller Them! is still good fun thanks to the taut pace and admirably serious approach he brings to it. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Special Effects.

In the screenplay by Ted Sherdeman and Russell S Hughes, based on the story by George Worthing Yates, radiation from atomic tests makes Warner Bros’ mechanical ants mutate into giant man-eating monsters twice the size of humans and they tramp from New Mexico to rampage in Los Angeles’s sewers after two queen ants have flown there and are starting a huge colony in the underground of the city.

James Whitmore stars as Ben Peterson, the New Mexico police sergeant who with his cop partner discovers a little girl (Sandy Descher) wandering in the desert and does what he can to save the day. He discovers her family’s trailer ripped apart, with her parents missing and casts of the strange footprints nearby, and gets them sent to a lab. The little girl is crazed and catatonic but finally screams hysterically: ‘AHHH! THEM! THEM! THEM!’

But Whitmore’s co-stars Joan Weldon and James Arness, playing scientist Dr Patricia Medford and an FBI agent man called Robert Graham, who come to New Mexico to investigate, are mostly too busy wanting to make love. So, the question is, can Weldon’s entomologist father, Dr Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn), help to save the day?

Yes, they can destroy the colony of ants in the middle of the desert but then there is that pesky new huge colony in the underground of Los Angeles.

Dr Harold’s idea is that the military can destroy the Los Angeles ant tunnels with flamethrowers but not until they have found the egg chamber and learned whether or not more ant queens have hatched.

Finally Dr Patricia asks her father whether all the atomic tests may have spawned new mutants. He replies: ‘I don’t know. When man entered the atomic age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.’

If Them! is just great retro fun now, it was an important, highly influential movie in its day. It is one of the first nuclear monster films and the first big bug film, starting the whole Fifties movie vogue for films about giant bugs, spiders and creepy crawlies, usually the result of radiation from atomic testing.

The film is in black and white but the film’s title is in blood red and blue, thanks to Warner Bros’s Eastman Color process.

Them!: Sandy Descher plays a crazed little girl wandering in the desert.

Also in the cast are Onslow Stevens (as Brigadier General Robert O’Brien), Fess Parker (as Alan Crotty), William Schallert (ambulance attendant, uncredited), Dub Taylor (as a railroad yard watchman), Leonard Nimoy (as an army sergeant), Chris Drake (as Trooper Ed Blackburn), Sean McClory (as Major Kibbee), Olin Howland (as Jensen), Sandy Descher, Mary Alan Hokanson, Don Shelton, Richard Deacon, Harry Tyler, Dick Wessel, Roydon Clark, Willis Bouchey, Richard Bellis, Ann Doran, Grandon Rhodes as Alcoholic Ward Doctor (uncredited), and Dick York as Teenager in Police Station (uncredited).

The young appears as an army sergeant who picks up a teletype message around the 57-minute mark. Fess Parker is effective, making a strong impression in his one scene in the Alcoholic Ward as Alan Crotty.

The special effects are by Ardell Lytle (pyroeffects supervisor, uncredited), with stunts by Roydon Clark.

A two-to-three minute scene after the projection sequence was cut from the film in the mid-Fifties after a lawsuit from a scientist whose name was used in the story for a fictional explanation of atomic energy effects on ants.

Them! is directed by Gordon Douglas, runs 94 minutes, is made and released by Warner Bros, is written by Ted Sherdeman (screenplay) and Russell S Hughes (adaptation), based on a story by George Worthing Yates, is shot in black and white by Sid Hickox, is produced by David Weisbart and is scored by Bronislau Kaper, with Art Direction by Stanley Fleischer.

Walt Disney cast Fess Parker (1924–2010) as Davy Crockett in Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier and Davy Crockett and the River Pirates, as well as in Old Yeller, after seeing him in a scene he liked in Them! (1954).

Other Fifties monster movies include The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), The Naked Jungle (1954) (army ants), Tarantula (1955), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) (octopus), The Deadly Mantis (1957), Beginning of the End (1957) (grasshoppers), The Giant Claw (1957), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Monster from Green Hell (1957) (wasps), Earth vs the Spider (1958), The Strange World of Planet X (1958), The Fly (1958), The Giant Gila Monster (1959), Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), and The Killer Shrews (1959).

Fess Parker (1924–2010).

James Arness died on June 3 2011, aged 88. He also starred in The Thing from Another World (1951).

Leonard Nimoy died on February 27 2015, aged 83.

William Schallert died on May 8 2016, aged 93.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 3720

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