‘Them!’ (1954)

IMDb meta-data: run time 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated a paltry 7.3 by a mere 16,696 cinemitizens.
Verdict: Classic.

Any circle drawn around the best Sy Fy movies of the 1950s, the decade when the genre was at its peak, includes ‘Them!’ It is a gem in every respect and retains the capacity to startle even jaded recidivist viewers like the fraternity brothers.
Before all that judgemental stuff though, first comes the set up. We start with a Cessna spotter aircraft flying over a desert dotted with Joshua Trees, the pilot in radio communication with two state patrolmen cruising down an empty highway in the high bright sun. The flyer spots movement and circles in on it. It is a child walking determinedly through the bleaching sun.
Sandy Descher
The patrolmen divert their car into the sand, to catch up and grab this nine-year old in a bathrobe with a broken doll. They have to grab her because she just keeps striding into the distance. She is mute and wide-eyed in shock, and she steals the show. Who is she? Where did she come from? Someone must be looking for her.
But who and where?
As darkness falls the police officers find a vacation trailer, ripped apart, and pieces that match her doll but no people, dead or alive. Further along at a gas station they find another scene of devastation. Picture an end of semester beer bust at Sig House and there it is: a disgusting mess. In each place sugar is much in evidence to we viewers but not remarked on by the plod. They radio all this in and a response is mobilized. One of the troopers, wearing a red undershirt, stays at the gas station to look around while the other drives to the hospital to see the child. Oh, oh.
Earlier Mr Pomfritt had collected her in an ambulance in a great scene. The three adults loading her hear a sound on the desert winds and look back at it, while behind them unseen she rises from the stretcher with a look of silent terror and falls back comatose. Marvellous.
The patrolman who stayed behind meets the fate of all Red Shirts. That’s why the fraternity brothers never wear Red Shirts.
They find footprints of a sort and make casts and take photographs. Since the trailer was rented by an FBI agent on leave, that bureau sends in Marshall Dillon to sort things out. He dutifully reports everything up the pipe to DC.
Next thing two myrmecologists show up and the plot thickens. After the ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ Edmund Gwen turned to ants along with his very professional daughter. These two are bug hunters worthy of Starship Trooper badges.
Spoilers follow.
The Trinity nuclear tests ten years ago at Alomogordo have produced some giant mutant ants now roaming the desert in search of…sugar.
Santa confirms this with the shocked child by giving her a sniff of ant juice. She utters the title!
Unforgettable to see her small face contorted in terror saying ‘Them!’ If she had said ‘The Thing!’ It would have been an whole other story because, as the fraternity brothers know, Marshall Dillion in a rubber head prosthesis was that Thing in the earlier movie of that title, reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
She is so compelling not even that notorious scene stealer James Whitmore had a chance, he of he mugs, eye brow wiggling, ear pulling, and snorting expertise.
Oddly for the time and place no one wonders if a woman can be a scientist or makes any stupid jokes about her. Just as well because later she is a dab hand with the flamethrower. Mostly the chaps stand back and let her get on with it. Very wise, chaps.
Santa gives lectures and prognosticates, but with Gwen it is almost fun listening to him. The mutant ants are going to take over the earth unless some Rid is applied soon and in a big way. Does Rid work on Trumpettes, asked the fraternity brothers?
The business is so dire that it is top secret and kept that way. Ha, as if some grunt won’t spill the whole story to a jackal of the press for a five spot. Well it is a work of fiction. The media then would exercise its responsibility to scatter confusion, panic, and destruction.
While on the fictitious nature of the film, there is quick and general agreement along the Potomac to act and to follow Santa’s direction. What does someone from the North Pole know about ants in the desert is a question no one asks. Both army and police personnel are serious, sober, sane, and disciplined, so we knew it was fake news. Not a self-serving careerist is in the lens frame.
The bugs head for the sugar capital of Lost Angeles! Bug hunting season opens in the sewers of Tinsel Town. Dr Daughter is ruthless and wants to kill them all! None of that scientific impulse to keep one alive for study. In fact she insists not just that they be killed, but also that when dead they be burned to ashes! The fraternity brother cringed on the sofa.
The police uniforms were a thing of wonder with braid, insignia, badges, stripes, chevrons, epaulets, gaudy enough for this month’s African dictator for life.
Something like this.
A reformed Mr Pomfritt after he went bad in ‘The Man from Planet X’ (1951), reviewed elsewhere on this blog, rides the ambulance.
It was filmed in the Mojave desert, or a facsimile thereof, with those Joshua Trees. How is it that a film set in the desert Southwest does not include any Latinos or Native Americans remains a good question. But it doesn’t and it has plenty of white-bread company in the genre.
On the other hand Davy Boone (figure it out) and Mr Spock are also present.
Mr Spock under cover.
The project had started as a big budget, Colour, and 3D picture from Warner Brothers. Uh uh, but Jack Warner always blanched at big budgets and even before the first shot it had been cut back to black and white and a flat 2D.