Tonight I thought I’d throw on some true classic monster movies from the golden age of the drive-in. I started the evening with Them! (1954).

James Whitmore leads the picture as Ben, a New Mexico cop on the lookout for a missing person. He and his partner, played by Christian Drake, find a little girl wandering alone in the desert, mute and unresponsive. A little further up the road a travel-trailer lies abandoned, its vinyl siding slashed to pieces. A bizarre footprint is found. Little by little the evidence mounts that something very strange is happening in the high desert.

This is the archetypal western Giant Monster movie. It was scooped (as was Gojira) on the trend by The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms a year earlier, but this is the film that cemented big critters as a mainstay of science-fiction in American cinema. Notably all three films use Atomic testing as the origin for their creatures, though each has a very different take on the concept.

When the local cops realize they are in over their heads (and the bodies start to pile up) they call in FBI agent Bob, played by the star of Gunsmoke! James Arness, who in turn calls in some government scientists to take a look. The doctors Medford are the most entertaining members of the cast; a father and daughter team of pharmacologist/entomologists working for the Department of Agriculture, their chemistry is delightful, and the elder Medford (Edmund Gwenn) delivers some truly excellent speeches throughout the runtime. Bob is less pleasant. His role seems to be to wear an ill-fitting suit, loudly demand answers from everyone, and clumsily hit on the younger Medford (Joan Weldon) while Ben does all the work.

The creature effects in this picture are great. The ants are freakish looking, and the eggs and other debris within their nests are very well done. There is one very naturalistic looking corpse that stood out to me as being almost modern-looking in comparison to most films from this era. There was blood, and visible injuries, but not overdone, and the body was placed very naturally. I think I was expecting this movie to look a lot worse than it did, and that factors a lot into how much I enjoyed it. The title sequence even holds a surprise, the film is shot in black-and-white, but the title, Them! is colorized and swoops in to almost pop out of the screen. I bet that was a real experience for drive-in viewers back in '54

The set design and prop work is all quite good as well. There is a sandstorm sequence near the beginning of the film that is just excellently shot, on a soundstage from the looks of it. It doesn’t look real, but it looks like how driving through a bad sandstorm feels, with the claustrophobic curtains of dust closing in all around. There are a few shots like this that lean into almost dreamlike imagery rather than strict realism, and it really helps sell the tense nervousness of the characters as they prepare to confront the unknown.

There is a ton of actual military hardware in this film, from rifle-grenades to Bazookas, to a whole bunch of flamethrowers. The main cast was loaded with WWII veterans who had actually used the things in combat, so they look and act very natural in a way that was interesting to see.

The human drama is also quite watchable. The parts where no monster is on screen are always the roughest bits in traditional Kaiju films, and I can maybe picture three of the human characters from the entire Godzilla franchise, but the whole cast here had distinct roles and were given things to do in them that made for a tight, entertaining mystery/procedural in the early scenes before the reveal of the monsters, and a solid thriller for the rest of the runtime. I actually cared about the fates of most of the cast, and when one of them is killed in the climax, I was pretty upset about which one it was. (Ben. They kill Ben the hero cop, and let Bob the sleazy, incompetent FBI man live.)

The elder Dr. Medford drip feeds his suspicions to the increasingly impatient Bob and Ben as the plot unfolds, and even if you know already what the monster is, it’s quite engaging to watch. At one point he gives a short film presentation on Ant ecology which was genuinely just a great little nature documentary (with some hilariously outdated factoids sprinkled in) that happens partway through this killer bug movie. Edmund Gwenn is one of the all-time greats, and he does not disappoint here.

There are jokes, and some of them are funny, but this is mostly a serious sci-fi picture. In fact, the degree to which it takes itself seriously was entirely unexpected. I forget sometimes that the trashy B-movies I grew up on were based on tropes that were originally played straight, and sometimes even had budgets to pull them off. This is a good movie, entirely aside from its legacy as the grandaddy of Big Bug movies, and I should have known that it would be a cut above the derivative stuff that came later. I’m going to give this one a 4/5 stars. If Bob weren’t a useless misogynist, and Ben didn’t die such a pointless death, I would call this a clean five stars, but alas, here we are.