(1954)

Starring Edmund Gwenn, James Whitmore, James Arness; dir: Gordon Douglas

Them! was one of Warner Bros biggest box office successes of its year. Today it is an oft-revisited exemplar of Cold War cinema.

Them! is a great suspense/chase thriller where, as U.S. critic Steven Scheuer points out, the story is "treated like a murder mystery rather than the shock approach usually employed in such SF films". Its entertainment value is enhanced by the wonderful atmosphere of its desert setting which, as with the previous year’s It Came From Outer Space (another superb Cold War sci-fi set in the desert), provides a sort of lab purity, as if civilisation isn’t around to muddy the waters.

While the narrative at times seems too methodical and overly absorbed with the technology, Them! is boosted substantially by Gordon Douglas’ deft handling of character interaction via a sharp banter that economically sets up the dynamics: boy-girl; inter-generational; science versus instinct; man and ant.  (In the twilight sub-subgenre of ‘ant cinema’ Them! reigned supreme until 1973, when the graphic design genius Saul Bass [title sequences of Vertigo, North By Northwest, Seconds, Anatomy of A Murder, not to mention the shower scene from Psycho] directed his only feature film, Phase IV, whose close ups of inscrutable ant faces reinforced its National Geographic-on-acid feel.)

Politically, director Douglas seemed to reveal his hand in 1951’s I Was A Communist for the FBI, one of those films whose title is so great you don’t have to see it. Them! seems both anti-communist (the martial law crackdown to eliminate the ‘weirdness within’) and anti-nuclear, yearning for a simple, pastoral past of prewar verities that probably reflected the sentiments of many Americans at the time, which helps explain its success.

Michael Rogin (in Reagan: The Movie) sees the film as revealing anxiety over female sexuality (the Queen ant’s fecundity is the key threat) and unbridled reproduction of clone-like subversives. Rogin is spot on when he clear-sightedly identifies the ‘training film’ screened for bureaucrats in Washington (warning against the ants’ "industry, social organisation and savagery" as "chronic aggressors [who] make slave laborers out of their captives") as anti-Soviet propaganda. The spookiest thing in Them! is the martial law clampdown.

(The second spookiest is a brief sighting of a very young Leonard Nimoy as a telex operator.)