Many of the great ’50s science fiction films inspired classic films in coming decades. Great films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien have their reference points in 50s cinema, and that’s to say nothing of the remakes of The Thing, The Fly, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Perhaps the Gen X classic that’s most indebted to the ’50s sci-fi monster classics is James Cameron’s Aliens. When you watch Gordon Douglas’s 1954 film Them! (which you absolutely should), the similarities are unmistakable.
Them! all starts with a young, mostly mute girl in the remote and foreboding desert of New Mexico encountering “them”. We eventually get flamethrowers, eggs, and a queen.
The setup is suspenseful and expertly done, with a police investigation taking us to abandoned homes and stores, and to a dead body or two. This first act is what must have inspired Cameron. The difference is that rather than aliens, we have giant ants. And this is where the problem might come in.
If you can’t get over the silliness of the monster, then this movie probably just isn’t going to work for you. But if you can appreciate the giant ant puppets for what they are, then this film is bound to entertain if not terrify, particularly because the buildup is fantastic. And honestly the puppets are pretty good, particularly in the scene where an ant crashes through the windows to kill someone. I can imagine modern audiences may have a hard time seeing the good filmmaking through the giant ants, but you need to imagine how it would have been received at the time.
The film has a solid cast for a movie with a relatively low budget (a budget that was slashed further just two days before filming began, according to IMDB). James Whitmore (quite an accomplished actor in his day, but now perhaps best known as the old guy with the bird in The Shawshank Redemption) plays a cop and the Thing from Another World himself, where James Arness, plays an FBI agent. Most exciting, though, is Edmund Gwenn, Kris Kingle from Miracle on 34th Street, playing an ant scientist. He may be frustratingly laid back in his role, but still carries that Santa Claus geniality.
I seem to recall referring to this film at one point on my podcast as one of the greatest films ever made – a particularly random comment considering it wasn’t one of the movies we were discussing, and I think I was relying on my co-host’s unfamiliarity with the movie in order to receive no backlash. So I’ll provide my own backlash here. It may not be one of the best movies ever made, but it’s one of the best movies of its kind. The pacing, locations, and suspense are all top-notch, and the ant attack sequences are thrilling, and one is even accompanied by one of the earliest uses of the Wilhelm scream. It may not be as good as James Cameron’s Aliens, but it’s a far better film than It! The Terror from Beyond Space, which helped to inspire Ridley Scott’s Alien. It’s probably closer in quality to the original King Kong than a movie about killer ants should be.
