The “atomic age” monster movie started with the previous year’s Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, in which atom bomb testing wakes up a dinosaur frozen in the Arctic Circle, but Them! is the first film to give us familiar living things—ants, in this case—mutated into giants by A-bomb radiation. It was one of the biggest hits of 1954 and spawned about 60,000 imitators.
Today, the film holds up as a suspenseful good time. It’s a combination of a monster movie and a police procedural. James Whitmore and James Arness are the law guys who fly around the country to follow up on reports of giant flying ant sightings and occasionally take up flamethrowers to barbecue some beasts. Little old Edmund Gwenn is the science guy who gets all the best lines about how everyone’s gonna die when/if the atomic ants take over the world.
We’re in big-budget Warner Bros. production territory here, but director Gordon Douglas is a B-movie kinda guy. He started out making Our Gang shorts in the 1930s and then knocked out a bunch of entertaining low-budget programmers in the 40s and early 50s, including the horror-comedy curio Zombies on Broadway and fun crime stories such as Walk a Crooked Mile and Between Midnight and Dawn. In the latter two films, Douglas demonstrated his skilled touch at the investigation procedure drama that Them! would later take after.