Them! (1954)

Anyone who has watched more than one episode of Archer, the very funny animated show about a dysfunctional, and often drunk, secret agent, should be all too aware of what you can do to get ants. Sugar spillages, sweet treats left around, just wandering around making funny noises while waggling discarded car radio aerials from your head, all of these things can attract ants. It wasn't just Archer that told us about this though. Back in 1954 we had Them! to thank for alerting us to the ant menace. These weren't any normal ants either. They were gi-ants.

While the cast here includes James Whitmore as a Sergeant, Edmund Gwenn and Joan Weldon as two scientists who are also father and daughter, and James Arness, the real reason for watching Them! is the giant ants, which are actually shown onscreen earlier than I thought they would be. The film is presented as a mystery for a number of the early scenes, but all of the clues are there to point towards the kind of creatures shown on the movie poster. What begins in the desert landscape of New Mexico will end in the very different terrain of L. A. in a film that holds up as a classic of the "oversized beastie" sub-genre.

Based on a story by George Worthing Yates, adapted and worked into screenplay form by Russell S. Hughes and Ted Sherdeman, Them! benefits from great pacing, more ambition than many of these films would have in subsequent years, and moments of mayhem that, despite being dated, still hold some power when watched today. Director Gordon Douglas does well with material that could have easily been mishandled, keeping things nicely balanced between the mystery, thrills, and the exposition. There's an energy and momentum to the whole thing, and it's somehow also light enough without injecting any forced and eye-rolling humour into any of the main sequences.

Considering how long I waited to finally get around to this, even after finding out about some of the main plot beats and the excitement of the third act, I was expecting to come away from this slightly underwhelmed. That wasn't the case though. This remains very deserving of a special place in the hearts of film fans, and those who love it will struggle to find anything coming close to it. You can get a fantastic film full of normal-sized ants with Phase IV, but your decent overgrown ant movie choices really boil down to just Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and Empire Of The Ants . . . none of the other attempts to wander through this territory have worked for me.

Everyone who is into their monster movies has already seen this by now. I am surely the last. But if you're a newcomer to creature features, or if you've just delayed this for as long as I did, then I highly recommend it. From the concept to the finalised special effects, from the sound design to the spectacle, it's just an absolute winner from start to finish. Get this cast and crew in place . . . and THAT'S how you get ants.

8/10

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Mubi Monday: The Bigamist (1953)

With the blunt title hitting at some kind of shocking melodrama, The Bigamist isn't a film that you go into with expectations of subtlety and twists. Director Ida Lupino still manages to do a bit more with the material than others might have done, working diplomatically with the screenplay by Collier Young to make something arguably better than it has any right to be.

Edmond O'Brien is Harry Graham, loving husband to Eve Graham (Joan Fontaine). The two are looking to adopt a child, which puts them under the scrutinising gaze of Mr. Jordan (Edmund Gwenn), and it's not long until that man discovers that Mr. Graham has a secret, another wife (Phyllis Martin, played by Lupino). In fact, he has a whole second life, something that he surely knew would be discovered when he began the adoption process.

Interestingly, especially considering the time this was made, The Bigamist takes time to show the various little moments that lead to the main character making some very foolish decisions, but it does so without constantly judging, and tutting at, all of those moments. It also lets a fairly silly plot unfold in a way that feels grounded and realistic, thanks to Young's script, and, again, I'd say that's a very pleasant surprise for the time it was made. The hardest part to swallow is the "framing device" which allows the morally-unshakeable Mr. Jordan to learn the full details of the story.

O'Brien is a decent enough lead, he's not a special man, he's just managed to get himself in a very unique situation. Fontaine and Lupino are both excellent, showing two different personalities with enough similar appeal to the lead, and it's impossible not to feel sympathy for both as you see things heading towards a third act that needs a revelatory moment on the way to some kind of punishment. Gwenn is fine, he does what he needs to do, which is mainly listen with interest as O'Brien unburdens himself of a secret that has been weighing on his mind for some time.

It's interesting to think of how this would be perceived if directed by a man, and how the material would have been executed. Lupino, an excellent director, and a woman with one of the most interesting careers to incorporate the glowing past of Hollywood (in terms of the path she took at a time when women had even less opportunities than they do today), allows everyone to be viewed with compassion. There's a man who battles his feelings until he thinks he can make everything work, and there are two women who both love that man, and are both unaware that their very presence would be a cause of pain to one another.

You know exactly what you're getting into with The Bigamist, and yet it also delivers the central message, the expected cautionary tale, with a surprising amount of care and understanding.

7/10

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