The death Monday of actor Richard Widmark at the ripe old age of ninety-three was foremost in my mind as I watched a late-night TV play of his 1978 apian disaster movie The Swarm last night.  One of producer Irwin Allen’s less successful movies, the best of which — 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure and 1974’s The Towering Inferno (not to mention his immensely entertaining TV series, including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel) — cemented his reputation as king of the disaster flicks with an eye for flamboyant adventure, The Swarm was curiously lame and furiously overwrought, even considering the alarming subject matter.  No more or less preposterous than an overturned ocean liner or a burning skyscraper filled with hoity toity partygoers, The Swarm’s masses of aggressive killer bees should have done the trick, but the popular consensus is that The Swarm was a bust.

Based on novelist Arthur Herzog’s 1974 novel, The Swarm was intended to dramatically capitalize on the impending real-life invasion of America by the righteously frightening Africanized bee, a variety of honeybee that is not only mean as hell but also a rotten producer of honey and a sub-par pollinator, to boot.  The product of a scientist’s quest for a super bee, the so-called “killer bees” escaped from their laboratory breeding ground in South America and began to dominate the placid honeybee.  At the time of The Swarm, the bees were expected to arrive any minute and take over America, bullying the other nice bees and chasing down children and old ladies.  In fact, the Africanized bee wasn’t found here in the U.S. until around 1990, but since then they’ve spread throughout the warmer South, wreaking some havoc and more or less living up to their creepy reputation.

But back in 1975, what would actually happen when the bees arrived was unknown, but for Hollywood that unknown was a terrific opportunity to capitalize on almost everybody’s fear of bees and bee stings.  If one little bee at a picnic table could send normal adults shrieking and flailing, imagine what a huge seething mass of irritated invader killer bees could do?  It was a premise too good to ignore, too terrifyingly over-the-top not to get it on screen.  Irwin Allen decided to both produce and direct The Swarm, and in his trademark style went after bevy of Hollywood names to fill the roles of the various scientists, doctors, military men, citizens and cheeky youngsters who were characters in Stirling’s Silliphant’s script.  (He had also written The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno for Allen). 

Leading the cast was Englishman Michael Caine, who after sealing his reputation as a fine actor in movies like Alfie, Sleuth and The Man Who Would Be King, turned up in several WW II action dramas before landing in The Swarm.  Katharine Ross (after making a splash in The Graduate and appearing in 1969’s popular Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) played an Army medico, the aforementioned Richard Widmark was a gruff Army bigwig at odds with the scientist (of course!), Richard Chamberlain (who at the time was sort of the King of TV movies, though this was several years before Shogun and The Thorn Birds) was another scientist, the legendary leading lady Olivia De Havilland played a school principal, Henry Fonda was a venom research doctor, Fred MacMurray was a small town mayor and suitor to Miss De Havilland, as was Ben Johnson.  Slim Pickens turned up as the father of a stung-to-death soldier, Patty Duke Astin was a pregnant waitress, Alejandro Rey (The Flying Nun) was a doctor, Lee Grant turned up as a crusading network TV reporter, Jose Ferrer ran the nuclear power plant which was overrun by the bees, Cameron Mitchell was another General, and one of my all-time favorite actors Bradford Dillman was a military attaché assigned to keep Caine out of trouble.  Surely no shortage of talent and competency there.

But The Swarm was silly and even more unfortunately rather boring, and in fact the small screen had successfully trumped the killer bee craze with a fondly remembered 1976 TV movie The Savage Bees starring Ben Johnson as a sheriff and Michael Parks as a scientist who tries to help New Orleans fend off a killer bee attack during Mardi Gras.  Baby boomer viewers will not soon forget the sight of Parks driving a VW Bug covered by a mass of swarming bees into the Superdome, then disabling them by using the stadium’s powerful air conditioning to cool them into submission.  Sure, it sounds a little stupid now, but it was a well-respected and highly-rated TV outing and packed a lot into its 90 minutes.  (Check out Morlock Jeff’s earlier article on bee movies for some additional titles of interest!) 

Any movie with a reputation like The Swarm — and a recent DVD release — is bound to have a lot of often hilarious and detailed websites devoted to it.  I’d recommend taking a look at all of these; each one is amazing and entertaining in its own way.  Like this one, and this one, and this one, and this one, and this one, and this one.  Of course, like many movies that don't quite turn out perhaps as their creators intended, watching The Swarm can be a lot of fun, and  in any case it's great seeing so many familiar faces giving their all in this lavish production.