Them!
          
Director: Gordon Douglas
Year: 1954
Rating: 8.0
Following quickly upon the footsteps of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Warner Brothers produced another giant monster film. With ants instead of a dinosaur and it works like a charm. When I saw this as a child, I was terrified and though not as terrified this time, it still has a great sense of dread and wonder. With a director who had nothing on his resume at this point to suggest that he could handle a monster film, Gordon Douglas does everything right here. It is taut, tense and so well edited that not a second is wasted on non-essential narrative. Even the expected romance between the FBI agent and the female scientist is skipped over. Douglas keeps it completely serious from moment one and even 70-years later, none of it comes across as campy or corny.  He keeps the story local for the first half and then it gradually expands to being a threat to the human population. It is all about killing those ants before they take over the world! 



As was often the case with these giant monster films, it was us that created them. The fear of nuclear weapons and radiation after Japan and the threat from Russia was deep in our psyche and the films played on that. This jumps quickly into the story but ever so quietly. Two patrolmen (James Whitmore being one) are driving out in the desert when they come across a small girl walking in a total trance unable to speak a word. Then soon come across a trailer that has been wrecked and a store where the manager has been cut to pieces. The connecting thing is sugar. Yes, the ants have a sweet tooth. No one has a clue what is going on and they call in the FBI (James Arness, two years before his 20-year run on Gunsmoke). No clue. I thought you FBI guys knew everything. So did I before I joined.



Again, nothing and they send for a scientist - the great Edmund Gwenn (Miracle on 34th Street) and his very attractive scientist daughter (Joan Weldon who was best known as an opera singer). She is no fainting lily and takes no "you are only a woman" crap from the two men - Arness and Whitmore - and thrusts herself into danger. This was when we still believed in scientists and he has a theory and they go out to investigate. Yup, yup I think so he says mysteriously - but then in one of those classic monster sightings the daughter is digging in the sand for footprints and above her an ant slowly comes into view. The ants are huge with nasty pincers and poison that they can shoot into your body. This was the site of the first atomic bomb test in 1945. And they have a nest with all those tunnels we have read about. In they go. And that is just the beginning.



This is one of the great giant monster films of the period and holds up amazingly well today. The ants were mechanical creations and operated by technicians. The little girl is Sandy Descher who kept getting acting gigs until 1969 and she gives one of the best screams in cinema history. A nine-year old Scream Queen. Also of note is Fess Parker as a man the doctors think is crazy because he saw flying ants - this was the role that got him Davy Crockett for Disney. Douglas went on to direct some fine films after this - In Like Flint, Tony Rome, The Detective, Lady in Cement and They Call Me Mr. Tibbs. A classic.