BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: GIANT RADIOACTIVE METAPHORS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the fourth distinct film titled simply Godzilla continues the grand tradition of movies in which the uncertain march of potentially dangerous science is embodied in the form of some kind of outrageous monster. As Godzilla'd out as this blog has no doubt become, I thought it was appropriate for one last hurrah with the genre, going all the way back to the same year that the original Japanese Godzilla premiered.

In the immediate wake of 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, two films made on two different continents picked up the idea of giant monsters roused by atomic explosions and ran with it. One of these, in Japan, was Godzilla, which adopted the perspective of a country that, uniquely in the whole world, was on the receiving end of atomic weaponry: the atomic monster as an unstoppable force that leaves unfathomable destruction and death behind it, only defeated by the invention of an even worse perversion of science than the atom bomb itself. The other, in the United States, was Them! - that's an obligatory exclamation point, you'll note - is just as obviously from the perspective of that country that made and launched those attacks against Japan in the first place. It is horrified and cautious about the unintended consequences of nuclear weapons, and by no means triumphalist about Scientific Progress (but then, American genre films in the '50s probably demonstrate a more pervasive hatred and mistrust of scientists and science than any other form of drama in any other era), but it's easy to see the difference between the films. Godzilla levels Tokyo and tuns it into a smoking ruin. They! are only able to severely inconvenience the residents of Los Angeles.

That sounds dismissive, but in truth, Them! is quite damn good. Easily the best of the giant insect movies that were so common in the '50s (a genre it largely created), which again sounds dismissive. The problem, perhaps, is that Them! comes from a genre and a time frame when even being moderately decent would have been an impressive success; there are no comparisons to be made that could really point to how strong it is as a movie qua movies. It had Oscar-nominated effects work, for God's sake (this was before visual and sound effects were given separate awards). How many '50s B-thrillers can make that kind of claim? But then, not many B-thrillers were made by a studios as well-heeled as Warner Bros. (also behind The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), boasting the resources on both sides of the camera that only a major studio could to provide to such an on-paper ridiculous conceit.

The film hides its conceit in a rather nimble way for a good third of the 93-minute feature, even if all the marketing had already spilled the beans. It's about giant ants, created by the nuclear testing in 1945, and as the characters note near the end, if it took nine years for the giant ants to make their presence felt, God knows what other fun surprises the Atomic Age will have in store. But I am jumping so far ahead: first, the movie introduces us to two New Mexico state policemen, Sgt. Ben Peterson (James Whitmore), and Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake), following a recon plane in their cruiser through the desert, investigating a weird report that came in. There's a little girl (Sandy Descher) wandering around in a nearly catatonic state, carrying a broken doll; she appears to be the sole survivor of an incident that left a car and trailer stranded in the desert, the trailer ripped open from the outside. The only evidence is an unrecognisable animal track. Later, another attack is discovered, this one leaving a body behind; a body loaded up with an entirely unreasonable amount of formic acid.

Between the track and the formic acid, the federal government gets involved, sending FBI Agent Robert Graham (James Arness) and scientists Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon), his daughter. The elder Dr. Medford has a very good idea of what's going on, but he's too methodical and afraid of causing a panic to come out and say it; instead he brings everybody out to the ruined trailer to investigate, and his unspoken theory proves itself true in a most visceral way, when they're attacked by an ant the size of an automobile. Now that they know what they're up against, our heroes immediately throw themselves into stopping the mutants, but even after destroying the nest out in the desert, the trouble is only starting: there's evidence to suggest that two ant queens left the nest before the human attack, to start their own colonies out in some yet unknown corner of the world.

It's all very close to material that would be unbearably stupid in many movies to come out in the years to follow, so why the hell is Them! so great, while something like The Deadly Mantis is so reprehensibly stupid? A lack of precursors, for a start: since Them! was where this particular subgenre kicked off, nobody involved knew that it was supposed to be tacky and disreputable. So they went and made a legitimate movie - just a fast glance over the cast raises that much of a suggestion. Edmund Gwenn was no movie star in 1954, but he was better than being dumped on a cheap programmer. No, this was a serious production, aiming to function as a legitimately intelligent horror thriller for an audience more sophisticated than the usual junky genre film crowd. Ted Sherdeman's script is damn crafty, opening as a sand-swept mystery that never tips its hat about what's going on until that first ant appears, at which point it becomes an urgent military procedural about the desperate need to figure out what's going on, and fast. There's only so far you can stretch the metaphor, but as thriller made in the Cold War, the sense of confused chaos and terror at not knowing where the threat is or where it's going to end up, despite all the powerful military tools at our disposal, has a real bite to it that makes the film land with more force than just a "we must kill the ants before they kill us!" scenario would ordinarily have.

Of course, it's still a really fine giant ant thriller. It was not a massively well-appointed production, but there was still plenty of time and money spent making the giant robotic ants look as... well, not realistic. But in their fanciful, abstract way, they're gorgeous props with an impressive range of articulation and movement, making for genuinely impressive antagonists for the humans in the cast. And after being downgraded from a widescreen, 3-D color spectacle, the full-frame black-and-white cinematography by Sid Hickox is rich and full of smart lighting and framing: the bleached-out New Mexico desert (played by the bleached-out California desert) is foreboding and bleak, while the ants' lairs are wonderfully gloomy and threatening, with the low light having the added benefit of keeping the monsters out of situations where full illumination might call attention to their technical shortcomings.

In short, director Gordon Douglas was taking all of this extremely seriously, exploring the subject with the full gravity of its horror and drawing out some surprisingly stable and earnest performances. Gwenn has a bit of comic relief business here and there (there's a little routine involving military radio etiquette that I find genuinely funny), but otherwise everyone is encouraged to behave as a normal person would under the circumstances: it's not a character-driven giant ant movie, exactly, but it's a movie where the naturalism of the acting and the steadfast refusal to allow even a drop of campiness to infect the proceedings serve to make the giant ants seem like a real and legitimate danger (the film even manages to sell what should, be rights, be a corny sequence with a grieving mother). And that is no small victory, nor a small part of why Them! is able to make the impact it does. From the little girl being plunged back into her memories and screaming "Them!" with all her might, to the sweaty tension exuded by the heroes as they crawl around the Los Angeles storm drains hunting for monsters, Them! honestly cares about what kind of fears and other emotions its loopy scenario would entail, and that invites us to believe in its objectively absurd notions without any kind of good sense holding us back. For all that it ends up suggesting that the might of the U.S. military will always save the day, and for all that there's never really the possibility of Godzilla-style widespread devastation, the film is shockingly sincere in its expression of its concept and themes, and that gives it a potency that no other giant bug picture ever came close to achieving. In it's highly circumscribed, genre-based way, this is an outright masterpiece.