CINEMA
Them! (London Pavilion)—Susan Slept Here (Gaumont).
MONSTERS, human or animal, three dimen- sional or flat, seem lately to have taken over almost uninterrupted tenancy of the London Pavilion. Hardly has The Mad Magician departed for the suburbs before a troop of twelve-foot ants, armour-plated and voraci- ously carnivorous, moves• menacingly in. These destructive creatures, the villains of Them!, threatened, as did their predecessors The Thing and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, 'the future of civilisation as we know it'; unlike those defrosted Arctic) discoveries, though, the giant ants—'strange mutations caused by radiation from the first atomic explosion'--have a genuinely alarm- ing look to the m : they arc monsters wholly lacking in charm. On the side of civilisation are the trad tional team: brill:ant, bumbling scientist (Edmund Gwenn), his pretty though scientific daughter (Joan Weldon), the FBI (James Artless), the pol:ce (James Whitmore) and large, be- wildered contingents of the American .army. A nest in the New Me xican desert is destroyed; the Cabinet meets in Washington; Los Angeles goes under martial law; the surviv- ing ants, hiding out, I,ke other criminals before them, in the city sewers, conic to a viols nt end; and civilisation is rcprievi d for another post-atom:c ntasy of destruction.
Smoothly put togeth.s, and narrate d in that brisk, business-like, semi-docum 'nary style wlt ch demands the acceptance of one initial impossibility and then aims at a cool plausibility, this latest mixture of science fiction and the old-style horror film is livelier and more persuasive than most. Anyone who has developed a taste for the ptu.t cuter blend---a slightly su peat taste, ix rhiips- should find Them! quite easy to take, if not to take seriously.
Any jokes about middle-age confronted by determined, youthful innocence that The Moon is Blue happened to overlook can be found, by those anxious to pursue the subject, in Susan Slept Here. The plot of this skittish comedy—a Hollywood writer marries a juvenile delinquent to save her from prison; he wants an annulment; she keeps h'in- comes off a familiar assembly-line, and the playing of Dick Powell as the smug, slightly jaded charmer, and Debbie Reynolds as the whimsical adolescent does little to liven up its relentless cliches. Perhaps a close season should be declared, for the time being, on all films featuring hard-boiled, motherly secre- taries, girls trailing around In men's pyjamas several times too large for them, and narra- tion by inanimate objects (in this case, an Academy Award statuette).
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