THEM!
1954
Directed by Gordon Douglas
Written by George Worthing Yates, Ted Sherdeman, and Russell Hughes
I don't believe I need to recant anything—well, not since making some small, surreptitious edits to old reviews—but I have from time to time suggested that 1954's genre-defining classic Them! (indeed, the progenitor of a whole science fiction subgenre of its own), gets more praise than it deserves; and if that only means "receives a higher fraction of the praise that should be more equitably-distributed amongst its often-derogated peers," then that's still true. But even if it has what I think are some more-or-less objective weaknesses, it's strikingly good at hiding those weaknesses, without making it feel like it's hiding anything; there are very good reasons why it's one of the most beloved and iconic sci-fi films of its decade.
Even so, one of those reasons is just simple priority, and its invention of the self-describing "big bug movie," since before Them!, I don't believe there's any film where that description would be accurate. (You'll have to make do with giant tarantula props in movies about something else, like in Mesa of Lost Women.) It kicked off a wave of giant arthropodal spectacles, one of 50s sci-fi's most-ballyhooed trends. However, though it feels impossible for it to have come so late, Them! might be the first movie about radioactive monsters of any kind. That's complicated, but if I say "radioactive monster," you know what I mean, and while the previous year's The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms had suggested what fertile ground fictional radiation would be, it's easy to forget that its rhedosaur was merely woken up by H-bombs, rather than created by them, only becoming "radioactive" when humans jammed isotopes down its throat. Fully nine years after Trinity, then, Them! is (I think) the first movie to fully seize upon the concept—it even beat Japan's Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla, by four months.
And that's an enlightening comparison: each hailing from a country that could not have had more dissimilar relationships to atomic weapons (the country that made Them! having dropped atomic weapons on the country that made Godzilla), it's not hugely surprising that they have different approaches, Them! being rather dryer and more procedural, and more pro-science and pro-scientist, whereas Godzilla cathartically barely-reimagines Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and declares the scientists (not the fascists, never the fascists) responsible. It might be surprising, however, that they sort of converge anyway, as disquieted allegories about the nuclear question, the American one concerned with the unintended consequences of the way America had achieved wartime victory and sort-of-preserved the post-war peace, a story exceptionally "of 1954," not yet disillusioned, but nonetheless disturbed by the prospect of a crisis emerging from America's burgeoning national security state, first barely perceived, then handled with immense secrecy and regrettable abuses by the same government that created the crisis in the first place, and finally, when it could no longer be suppressed, blossoming into martial law to fortify America against the threat. It's easily read as anti-communist, and that's fair (it activates that anxiety, and for much of it, it's practically a spy movie; Them! might be the most xenophobic-sounding title imaginable), but it's worried about a lot of things. Pinning it down to just that one would, after all, overlook where its threat came from, a stretch of desert northwest of Alamogordo, a name that, along with White Sands, the movie suspects you'll recognize long before it acknowledges the connection aloud.
This also means that Them! bears much responsibility for making "50s sci-fi" almost synonymous with "desert mystery." It Came From Outer Space came first, and maybe it was inevitable anyway, when the decade's science fiction is so thoroughly overshadowed by what happened northwest of Alamogordo in 1945 that they're all some kind of allegory for nuclear fears. But Them! made drawing upon the eerieness of location shooting out in the Californian desert respectable. With desert backdrops proliferating to the point that even Corman cheapies could take advantage of their desolate power, you have to attribute to Them!'s screenwriters—Ted Sherdeman along with Russell Hughes, working from an original story by George Worthing Yates (the latter's first foray into the genre and establishing him as a pillar of it)—the kind of influence worth being a little in awe of.
As a forerunner, it courted some risk, but the independently-produced 20,000 Fathoms' success had convinced its distributor, Warner Bros., to make something like it themselves, and right up until production the intent was a very prestige-oriented movie about giant radioactive bugs, in color and 3-D. Somebody blinked (Warners was simultaneously nixing Dial M For Murder's 3-D run), so the primary indication of these origins is just the gaudy color title card bursting out 3-D-style from the black-and-white image. Rumor is that producer David Weisbart personally funded the cumbersome editing of distribution prints this entailed; whatever the case, I wish nobody had, for while the film's admittedly-sensationalist name, Them!, is anchored solidly in its narrative, the clown-colored frippery of its onscreen logo is beneath its dignity. (And what of aspect ratios? I've actually never seen it in its "intended" matted widescreen, but it was released in Academy in that format's dying stretch; and just going by my DVD copy, I wonder how much widescreen was intended. I think, at least, that we have a director and cinematographer better-accustomed to Academy.)
Probably, we got the best of all worlds: I'd be curious about Them! in color, let alone 3-D (though as this shift came so late, a few of the planned 3-D-exploiting set-ups are still here, and the flamboyance of a 50s 3-D set-up is already half the fun). But the black-and-white almost certainly suits it better, from the way the desert reproduces in bleak monochrome to how flamethrowers blow out the contrast, from the way a hardness seeps into the mood (a sensation that probably wouldn't have survived 3-D) to the way the abstraction and obscurity of black-and-white benefit the effects work—and maybe it just feels correct, when the mode of 50s sci-fi is black-and-white, and Them! is so exemplary of "the mode"—though when it comes to the effects, and other niceties, it remained an A-movie production. And you can see its budget all over, notably in some reasonably substantial subterranean sets, though of course the thing that really comes across as lavish for its particular subgenre is "them" themselves.
Now, if it seems I've been pointlessly cagey about that, having gotten deep into a discussion of Them! without saying the word "ants" once (and despite having given the game away immediately by identifying Them! as the source of all big bug movies), well, that's mostly down to the meandering, undisciplined style that I hope you're used to by now, though maybe I did it unconsciously because that's exactly what Them! does, despite almost every last piece of marketing for it also giving the game away, plastered with images of enormous "ants"—allegedly—with those great big cat's eyes and mandibles shoved inside fleshy mouths, which isn't remotely what the movie's monsters look like, but does basically tell you what the titular pronoun and exclamation point refer to. That said, based on some other pieces of advertising, and some stray commentary by eyewitnesses still around to say, the actual pre-release marketing didn't do any of this. Instead, the "ants! presumably!" posters all came post-release, the cynical supposition being that Warners was embarrassed of their movie about giant ants until such time as their movie about giant ants proved a groundswell hit. Alternatively, by week 2 everybody just already knew (we're currently in week 3,715).
Yet so much of the fun is how diligently Them! pretends you don't already know, its opening half hour being possibly the most perfectly-formed example of "waiting anxiously for the monster's first unambiguous onscreen appearance" its side of Jaws. Things begin out in the Mojave part of the Chihuahuan desert. Here, two cops, Peterson (James Whitmore) and Blackburn (Chris Drake), are on a search prompted by reports of a girl (Sandy Descher) wandering about the scrubland. When they find her, she's been traumatized into muteness, the result of whatever happened to her vacationing parents, whose trailer the cops discover has been destroyed—pulled open, from what looks like the outside—with a few unidentifiable footprints around the site, but no bodies. As night falls, they stop by a local store, and find that it too has been destroyed, though this crime scene does have a body, later described as having died from all sorts of things, especially from being chock full of formic acid. The money remains untouched. The sugar has been disturbed. And throughout we've been hearing a noise that they only hope is the wind—leaving Blackburn to guard the site proves an error. Soon arrives FBI Agent Graham (James Arness), who's hardly any help, but the footprint he sends to Washington gets the attention of someone in the Department of Agriculture, and they send two scientists—Doctors Medford and Medford (Edmund Gwenn and Joan Weldon), father and daughter—who seem to have a very firm notion of what's happening here, and they're even more certain after they retraumatize the mute child with a glass full of formic acid, breaking her silence as she recognizes the scent of "THEM!" Still coy (though you should have a strong inkling from how many times I've mentioned "formic acid"), they drag the cop and the agent out to the desert to stand, unintentionally, face-to-face with the threat they'd theorized: radiation-mutated ants, grown to the size of cars, hundreds if not thousands of them, when even one takes a full magazine from a submachine gun to bring down. And though they quietly bring in the army to eradicate the nest here in New Mexico, they realize they were too late: the nest has already birthed queens, and they've flown.
This is all terrific, from the persistent tingle of danger to numerous individual standout scenes, for instance the way Blackburn's belief in a reasonable explanation crumbles in the moments before he dies in the dark, or the more-or-less immortal onscreen arrival of the first of Them!'s many giant ants, cresting a hill amidst a duststorm while Dr. Medford fille is looking in the wrong direction, only to get a real hell of a shock when she turns towards the right one. In other circumstances, it would seem pretty backhanded to even facetiously suggest that a nine year old supporting actor is giving the film's best performance, but I don't know if it is facetious here, and it's certainly not backhanded (even if I slightly wish that director Gordon Douglas had run Descher through a few alternate takes, and perhaps some alternate blocking, for her one line): she's really that good at the not-quite-catatonic state of shock the ants' attack has left her in. It's definitely no knock on the grown-ups. Whitmore's evocation of compassion for poor little Descher is deeply humanizing, and anchoring the first act to his journey into the unknown justifies (at least so you won't get bitchy about it) keeping a local cop around all throughout this movie that's not even about New Mexico after the halfway point. Gwenn's striking a superb balance between an aloof egghead who knows he's onto an epochal discovery and a man who's irritated and nervous, not just about his reputation, but because if he is right, but isn't believed, then the catastrophe will become exponentially worse. (Then he throws in some garrulous eccentricity for good measure.) For her part, Weldon is required to secure to her younger myrmecologist all the authority her father receives automatically. And Arness is at least good enough, taking recourse to a hardboiled, slightly-ironic pose that you can interpret as trying not to let on how much he doesn't like throwing his government's weight around.
All good stuff (though, truthfully, Arness is basically only plot glue), and the actors' agreement to treat it with just the right amount of seriousness leavens the pulp quite a bit, though what makes it great pulp is just what makes it pulp in the first place, and that's Douglas's methodical, step-by-suspenseful-step buildup of the threat culminating in special effects designer Ralph Ayers's pay-off to that buildup. It's surprising that Douglas has virtually no footprint in sci-fi or horror otherwise; his other claims to fame are Our Gang shorts and—I guess it's speculative fiction—In Like Flint. As for Ayers, one of the wackier things to realize about 50s big bug movies is just how many different effects approaches the concept prompted—from stop-motion animation to real bugs, double-exposed to real bugs, menacing postcards—but the one Them! takes is bluntly ambitious, just building some giant Goddamn ants. It means that there's hardly a single process shot in the entire movie, besides the unavoidable "welp, we're in a vehicle, time for some rear projection" stuff, and Douglas has more access to his actors interacting with the monsters that just about any other similarly-situated movie you could name. (It also means that Ayers's giant mechanical ant puppets are typically not seen except intruding into frame, or otherwise having some of their bodies—and their operators—obscured, but this is rarely the obviously incorrect choice, and they manage a handful of high-impact shots of the ants in full view, including one carrying out its hive's "trash," that is, human bones.) The puppets, anyway, are outstanding, and, considering the limitations of their vintage, surprisingly-detailed and even more surprisingly-active, and while not entirely biologically-accurate, realism was clearly more the goal than usual for giant monster puppets. Being physical objects, they necessitated that art director Stanley Fliescher build some pretty big tunnel sets to house them, in turn necessitating cinematographer Sidney Hickox to figure out some pretty atmospheric ways to present those tunnels. Best of all, since they are physically there on-camera, they can be destroyed on-camera, for instance with fire. It's only a pity that the first one isn't squibbed to hell and back, but there's some manner of wet effect they use for "ant blood," and it dies horribly hard, though that's as much a special case of William A. Mueller's unforgettable sound design, a combination of all sorts of animals mixed into a cacophony that nevertheless retains an alien personality, which is supposedly "stridulation," but can't be anything but screaming, altogether as responsible for the horror of Them! as the effects are.
The downside, and there is a downside, is that I've only actually described a little over half the film, and, to be clear, there's nothing truly wrong with the second half, and it's never not cool—in theory, it's even escalating entirely well, threatening LA and giving us a new backdrop in the form of its sewers, consistent with but sufficiently distinct from the visuals we've already seen, plus this is where the movie gets to observe, with subtle distress, the authoritarianism of the governmental response. (This is also where Gwenn oversees a nature documentary module, notionally a presentation to bureaucrats, but more obviously intended for an audience perceived to be so ignorant about ants that the clue, "formic acid," was supposed to be enigmatic.) Still: it's hard to shake the sensation that the movie has already climaxed and straight-up started over, down to accidental repetitions of things that made sense the first time but don't now (months after the discovery of giant radioactive ants, the elder Medford is still playing his cards close to the chest); and while the screenplay gamely continues to pretend that it's proposed the apocalypse, it's difficult to fully banish the impression that once the military's arrived, the entire rest of the story is just a foregone conclusion, given that the ants simply aren't that powerful, at least not on the civilization-sized scale Them! has now obliged itself to operate on. (They have been amply demonstrated to be, at best, merely bullet-resistant.) It's a movie that earns every right to go big, but was at its best when it was still small; and it's enough to idly wish that the half of the film that's a handful of heroes groping and guessing their way across a single corner of the desert was just the whole film instead.
Score: 8/10
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
- Medford pere seems very convinced there's a fully-populated colony out there, and the movie plays along, though I sure don't think that that much biomass attempting to sustain itself in a Goddamn desert would've have stayed "a mystery" that long.
- I don't believe we'd have to worry too much about a truck-sized ant's capability of flight.
- They'd have all asphyxiated long before this point anyway, the diffusion-reliant losers.
The morality of the past, in the future!:
- We get run through all the normatively-sexist preliminaries—the younger Medford is introduced with her gams hanging out of the underside of a B-25, "if the 'doctor' bothers you, you can call me Pat," finally Graham protectively yelling at her to stay out of evil anthills—none of which really sticks, and, pleasantly enough, it's the one aspect of the first half that doesn't get replicated in the second.
- My favorite idiosyncratic touch here, however, is the elder Medford's cultivated habit of referring to his daughter as "Doctor," especially in public, an affectation that suggests more of a coherent, fascinatingly worked-out shared history than the movie's even asking for.
- I hope Graham remembered to let the "crazy" pilot who saw the ants' nuptial flight out of the asylum.
- They declare a curfew, but wouldn't having Los Angeles's two million eyes peeled for the hidden ants be more useful?
- The employment of white phosphorous is technically a war crime. Well, it would be with people.
Sensawunda:
- Undoubtedly somewhat less if it'd been in color and if they'd stuck with the purple-green the ants were painted. I daresay the color you perceive through the black-and-white is "reddish-brown."
- Obviously a ton of (frightful) wonder here, though, thanks to the undeniable physical presence of those ants.
No comments:
Post a Comment