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 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