In 1954, science fiction filmmaking was actually on the wane; RKO, Fox and Paramount had made a few very successful A pictures, but by 1953 the genre was already starting to be dominated by cheaper independent product. Universal and Warners tried their hand with outer space stories and monster movies, but the overall trend was to scale back production: if the market rushed to see a no-budget show like Target: Earth!, stars and real spectacle weren't required. Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to earn what Herman Cohen or Lippert were getting by spending fifty or sixty?

Jack Warner hit the brakes twice during preproduction. The 3-D was abandoned first, and then, just two days before shooting, Warner decreed that the show not be shot in color either. Apparently he thought the whole project was just junk. His opinion remained the same after Them! was became the studio's biggest moneymaker of the year. No Son of Them! ever had a chance of happening.

Douglas marshalled a perfect production to give Them! a high degree of credibility. His New Mexico desert is very real - gritty, dusty, and bleak - and no place for a casual stroll, as in Tarantula!. Little Sandy Descher's lost girl starts the picture off with a different kind of poetry - the absolute innocent alone in a hostile and increasingly alien world. Forget the singing cowboys ... there's radioactivity out there.

The emotional center of the film is James Whitmore's Sgt. Peterson. Whitmore had started over at MGM, where he had personified producer Dore Schary's rather condescending image of the average American Joe in The Next Voice You Hear, a mish-mosh of humanistic & religous ideas. Moving between studios, Whitmore got a variety of roles (Kiss Me Kate) but made his strongest impression as soldiers and cops. His policeman here is a humanistic everyman, the perfect WW2 veteran dedicated to keeping the peace and saving children. He's how we baby boomers like to remember our fathers, gentle men who had once been to war, and now wanted something different.

James Arness at this time was a bonafide protégé of John Wayne, doing his darndest to elbow his way into a career. His delivery, mannerisms, etc., are almost laughably patterned on Wayne's style. He starts as a handsome FBI man and, like most everyone else, becomes a soldier by the last reel. The terrifying finale of Them! basically has Arness as John Wayne in the dark, with clicking monsters closing in from all sides. Prescription? Open up with your tommygun in all directions at once, and hope for the best.

Edmund Gwenn balances his fuddy-duddy, House on 34th Street persona with grim, oracle-like predictions of a world poised on the brink of a strange new age. Unlike the bonafide philosophical split between soldiers and scientists in the Hawks/Nyby The Thing, the warriors and eggheads (and politicians, too) of Them! have achieved total solidarity. It takes some convincing for the moronic Washingtonians to get with the program, but once they do, America becomes an efficient self-healing machine - the military-industrial-political complex Eisenhower warned about. Unlike the real Oppenheimers in '50s America, Gwenn's Dr. Medford isn't sidelined as a dissident: the generals don't make a move without his okay. It takes a pro like Gwenn to make the character both serious and comic, as almost every scene ends with him fielding another zinger: "... Man, as the dominant life form on Earth, may be extinct."

Joan Weldon's stock 'scientist's daughter' character predicts another unsettling post-nuke change taking place - a cold-war version of women's liberation. You'd think that Weldon's scientific expertise would enhance her social mobility. Instead it frees her to don a uniform and step into line alongside the he-men to help fight America's enemies. Pat is plenty eager for the job, and easily the least emotional and most bloodthirsty of the bunch, as evinced by her callous order: "Burn everything in here! Burn it all!"

Them!'s visuals suggest that to survive in the new Atomic Age of Terror, man will have to become more like savage ants. By show's end, all the major characters have converted into soldiers. The heroes wear bug-like goggle eyes and creep through tunnels to locate and destroy the enemy. The utter killworthiness of the giant ants is never questioned, as it is indeed 'Them' or 'Us.'

Them! is packed with colorful character actors. Fess Parker jumped from unknown to media hero in one stroke, when Walt Disney caught his animated performance here and signed him to play Davy Crockett. The bit player list is a who's who of interesting folk, like William Schallert, Leonard Nimoy, Richard Deacon, Dub Taylor, Olin Howland, and Walter Coy (Aaron Edwards in The Searchers). The very capable Mary Alan Hokanson should have gotten a career from her role as the distraught mother.

The exciting score by Bronislau Kaper was recorded a few years back as one of the first entries in the Monstrous Movie Music CD series. It included not only a 'suite' to accompany Edmund Gwenn's 16mm speech about 'our enemy, the ant', but the uncut ending, which builds to a powerful finale. Like many Warners films of the time, the editing is very tight, and it looks as though the last shot was faded early, to hurry to the The End card and get those house lights up. When the film is compared with the CD, it's immediately clear how the music editors radically upcut the original ending fanfare.

Warner's DVD of Them! is a very pleasant surprise. It is so clean, it feels like a new transfer. Judging by the shape of the title blocks, the correct aspect ratio is probably 1:66, and cropping off the flat full-frame transfer in a 16:9 television looks best, even though it's a bit too tight on the bottom. In the drain tunnel sequence, diffusion was used to soften the image. A couple of shots look as though a texture has been applied to the screen, but I can't tell if this is from the original photography, or something that occurred during encoding.

The presentation is very appealing. Some colorful and cute comic-book menus are a bit hard to navigate but do the job. One of the text extras is a cursory history of big bug movies. The imitators shown are all from other studios ... Warners' own prominent The Black Scorpion is not mentioned. The terrific trailer is here too. It has that desired 'gotta see' quality, and ends with a boffo graphic gag where the four letters of the title spell out words like Terror!, and Horror!.

The best extra by far is a selection of outtakes of the giant ant props, that let us see them very clearly. Critics of the props can complain that they're too slow, and creep too mechanically. Stop-motion animation would have had a feel totally different to the 'in your face' chompers seen here. In these outtakes, we also immediately appreciate the superior editing used to keep the ants looking good: individual shots are very brief and often impart extra motion to the models via pans and tilts. A couple of wide unused takes on a static ant show how bad it could have been. As soon as the ants are motionless they look ridiculous, like the gorilla robot in the 1976 King Kong. Carefully edited and augmented with sound effects, windblown sand, explosions, falling timbers and flames, they're a knockout.

The box art is not the terrible graphic we've been looking at for about 15 years on VHS and laserdisc packaging, but a faithful collage from the original posters, with their impossibly cartoonish bug-eyed bug monsters. A 'scrambling citizen' motif is repeated from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' key art. Screams a blonde: "Kill one and two take its place!" The DVD liner copy hits the nail on the head when it suggests that Them! gets better with age - this is the 1950's radioactive monster movie, and it's just as exciting now as it was back then.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Them! rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Trailer, text files, effects outtakes
Packaging: Amaray case
Reviewed: August 11, 2002