looking straight at THEM! UNDERSTANDING THE BIG BUG MOVIES OF THE 1950S

Environmental History, Apr 2007 by Tsutsui, William M

ABSTRACT

Giant insects, from the ants of Them! to the locusts in Beginning of the End, featured prominently in Hollywood's postwar science fiction boom. Critics and historians have invariably interpreted these cinematic big bugs as symbolic manifestations of Cold War era anxieties, including nuclear fear, concern over communist infiltration, ambivalence about science and technocratic authority, and repressed Freudian impulses. This essay argues that Hollywood's mammoth arthropods should be taken more literally, less as metaphors than as insects, and that the big bug genre should be analyzed in the context of actual fears of insect invasion and growing misgivings about the safety and effectiveness of modern insecticides in 1950s and early 1960s America. In movies like Them!, worries about real-life insects on the loose, notably gypsy moths and imported fire ants, and uneasiness about pesticides like DDT were refracted through a cultural lens colored by superpower rivalries, nuclear proliferation, and a wide range of social tensions.

IF YOU HAPPENED to go to the movies very often in the 1950s and early 1960s, you were sure to have encountered more than your fair share of giant insects. In Hollywood's postwar sci-fi boom, which brought more than five hundred science fiction films to American movie palaces, neighborhood theaters, and drive-ins between 1948 and 1962, huge mutant arthropods frequently took the starring roles. Such movies ran the gamut from campy howlers with lamentable special effects to polished and relatively big-budget efforts like Them!, now regarded as something of a classic in the homicidal insect genre. Them!, which was Warner Brothers' highest grossing film of 1954, is the story of ants from the nuclear testing ranges of New Mexico, mutated to gargantuan size by long-term exposure to residual radiation. After making a mess of the rural southwest, the mammoth ants move on to the big city, turning the storm sewers of Los Angeles into a sprawling concrete ant hill. Happily for humanity, infantrymen with flame throwers do in the nest, roasting the terrifyingly fecund queen, and normalcy is restored to American society.

Them! was not only a box office hit, but was also an unlikely critical darling. The Saturday Review praised the film for being "as persuasively realistic a horror story as one could possibly imagine" while the usually dyspeptic Bosley Crowther of the New York Times lauded it for being "tense, absorbing, and surprisingly enough, somewhat convincing."1 Other studios were quick to try cashing in on Theml's success and soon giant arthropods were as common as chisel-jawed leading men and busty starlets on Hollywood's back lots.2 Mesa of Lost Women was the charmingly awful story of giant arachnids produced by pituitary gland experiments gone terribly wrong; Tarantula (from 1955) was a similar tale of mutant lab spiders on the loose and controlled only thanks to the U.S. Air Force, a dashing jet pilot (played by a young Clint Eastwood), and the generous administration of napalm. The Deadly Mantis and The Black Scorpion, both from 1957, seem largely self-explanatory. Beginning of the End (with Peter Graves) is a campy treasure: Swarms of school-bus-sized locusts are produced from a USDA test of radioactive fertilizers and converge on Chicago after the world fails to notice that they've consumed most of downstate Illinois.3 Wasps rendered monstrous by cosmic rays were the baddies in 1958's The Monster from Green Hell, and a giant man-eating black widow scared the penny loafers and bobby socks off the unsuspecting teenagers of River Falls, U.S.A. in Earth vs. the Spider. The ants threatening Charlton Heston's Amazon plantation in The Naked Jungle are just normal size but, as a terrified government official hysterically warns, the mammoth swarm becomes "a monster twenty miles long and two miles wide, forty square miles of agonizing death." Other films, like The FIy and Roger Corman's no-budget groaner The Wasp Woman, posit the grotesque fusion of humans and insects in biologically improbable (but visually arresting) ways. And in The Incredible Shrinking Man, a movie far more thoughtful than its title would suggest, the unfortunate (and quite tiny) victim of toxic clouds of radiation and insecticide is forced to battle a spider with nothing but a pin and some bits of thread.

Giant insects put in cameos in dozens of other (largely forgotten) science fiction offerings and also cropped up in foreign-made films, notably Horrors of Spider Island, a hilarious German cheapie about a plane load of scantily clad fashion models marooned on a South Pacific atoll just crawling with breadbox-sized arachnids. This offering of Europe's finest cinematic cheese, also released under the improbable title It's Hot in Paradise, featured the classic big bug movie line, "A dead man, in a huge web ... Oh Gary!"4 The Blood Beast Terror, a British production released in 1968, just after the golden age of big bug movies, creatively blended the horror and sci-fi genres by featuring a "were-moth" (think a lepidopteran werewolf) that drank human blood. Peter Cushing, whose filmography reveals much to be ashamed of, supposedly proclaimed this his least favorite movie. And finally, one should not forget that most famous and enduring of arthropod leading ladies, Mothra, who made her debut in 1961 and would go on to appear in thirteen films produced by Japan's Toho Studios, most recently in the 2004 Godzilla fiftieth-anniversary blockbuster. Not only was Mothra (with a 25o-meter wingspan) significantly larger than all of Hollywood's big bugs, but she was also exceptional in having a name, an ascribed sex, a group of South Pacific islanders that worshipped her (as well as curious associations with Christianity, at least in her first feature), and a personality generally seen as gentle and benevolent, despite her periodic attacks on Japanese cities.5