Planet of the Apes
(1968)
Review
by : Eric
Barker
Starring:
Charlton Heston (Taylor), Roddy McDowall (Cornelius),
Kim Hunter (Zira), Maurice Evans (Dr. Zaius), James Whitmore
(Assembly President), James Daly (Dr. Honorious), Linda
Harrison (Nova), Robert Gunner (Landon), Lou Wagner (Lucius),
Jeff Burton (Dodge)
Directed by: Franklin J. Schaffner
Written by: Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, from
novel "La Planete des singes" by Pierre Boulle
|
"Tell
me though, does Man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious
paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his
brother? Keep his neighbor's children starving?" -- George
Taylor, misanthropic astronaut
Landmark,
multi-layered science fiction film of the sixties, one of
the first to make a serious effort at creating a realistic
alien culture with its own internal logic. "Planet of the
Apes" (1968) remains one of the movies' great Shadow narratives,
a satire of modern hubris in which a man comes face to face
with all of his prejudices and finds he has nowhere left to
run.
Much of
the film's quality must be attributed to the screenplay by
Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, two exceptional writers of
the time who constructed an elegant and purposeful roller
coaster from Pierre Boulle's 1963 "social fantasy" (first
published in the U.S. as "Monkey Planet"). Wilson/Serling
changed many things, either because of budget concerns or
for purposes of dramatic compression, but their most striking
addition (probably Serling's) was transforming the novel's
callow narrator Ulysse into the skeptical, embittered starship
commander Taylor.
As played
by Charlton Heston -- at the pinnacle of his box-office clout,
and before he became such an impossibly politicized figure
in American culture -- Taylor is the most unsentimental of
men, an arrogant misanthropist who has volunteered for his
journey to the stars in the hopes of finding something better
than the human race. Fired into the cosmos beyond the speed
of light, he and his crew have transcended earthly Time as
well as Space, traveling thousands of years into their own
future, and Taylor relishes baiting his fellow astronauts
over their romantic illusions of heroism and immortality.
Even if they could meet their descendants, he reminds them,
the current masters of Earth would "think you were something
that fell out of a tree."
One of
the many storytelling beauties of "Planet of the Apes" is
the way in which the Wilson/Serling screenplay constantly
sets up Taylor for a new fall from grace every ten minutes
or so, and it isn't just to keep things interesting. An uncomfortable
truth lies at the heart of the film's odyssey, a terrible
vision of chance and human nature, but it is being saved for
the final revelation. Meanwhile, Taylor undergoes several
mythic trials by fire that arouse his compassion for his own
kind.
His first
rude awakening comes not long after the above statement, when
he finds himself lost and utterly alone in a Kafkaesque nightmare,
a violent dystopia where the evolutionary tree has branched
in "upside down" directions, where great apes dominate over
all with ruthless efficiency and human beings are hunted like
animals, caged and subjected either to cruel experimentation
or quick extermination for no clear reason -- except that
they're dumb, filthy brutes who use up natural resources without
giving anything back to their environment. The apes, in fact,
seem to regard humans as a dangerous pestilence, their attitude
less a mirror of the way humans on Earth might treat primitive
apes than the way they commonly treat diseased rats.
Taylor
is mute when he is first captured, just another animal wounded
in the hunt, and through his eyes we discover the apes live
in a bizarre society reminiscent of medieval Europe, its structure
part caste system, partly based on race divisions: orangutans
are at the top of the order, the guardians of legal tradition;
gorillas are the enforcer underclass, doing all the dirty
work; and chimpanzees, smartest of the crowd, form a questioning
middle class, the scientists who strive for a better world
and are constantly being undermined by political necessity.
Through the characters of Zira and Cornelius, "Planet of the
Apes" represents one of the first moments of science fiction
cinema in which scientists are treated as reasonable members
of society, rather than as dangerous Prometheans, ever prone
to releasing some uncontrollable natural horror on the populace.
The film even satirizes this attitude toward scientists, and
toward intellectuals in general, but these groups had to be
made into apes first, a no doubt conscious Darwinian joke
among many inserted by the writers. In this film, the joke
is on everyone.
What keeps
"Planet of the Apes" a vital and lively cinematic experience
long after subsequent "sci-fi" movies have lost their potency
is the myriad ways in which it is open to interpretation.
On one level, it's simply a high class adventure story, a
cut above the usual genre piece of its era, slicker and more
expensive than most sixties science fiction films; but then,
there's that other, irresistible level, where the inside-out,
turned tables of its fantastic setting tickles everyone's
imagination in a different way. When first released, some
critics and audiences saw a schematic representation of the
civil rights struggles that were heavy on everyone's mind;
others saw a blatant counterculture critique of American hegemony
over space travel, politics, and warfare.
In the
interrogation scene, where Taylor is humiliated by a panel
of closed-minded orangutan judges, critic Pauline Kael saw
the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of the twenties, a battle
royal over the teaching of evolution in U.S. schools, and
given "Apes' " constant references to who came first, Humans
or Simians, a valid connection for anyone to make. But the
dramatic essence of the scene is lifted directly out of a
book by a Frenchman who was satirizing academic intransigence
and the madness of crowds, and anyway, it could just as easily
be related to the continuing specter of McCarthyism in American
life, especially since one of the writers, Wilson, was blacklisted
for fifteen years because he wouldn't name names to the House
Un-American Activities Committee.
"Planet
of the Apes" overflows with allusions to eternal social ills,
often for comic effect, so that it can easily be reinterpreted
from generation to generation (these days it seems to have
an uncannily prescient take on ecological concerns). Occasionally
it's a little too glib, with it's persistent bad puns, both
visual and verbal -- a gorilla zookeeper quips "human see,
human do"; the panel of orangutans mime "see no evil, hear
no evil, speak no evil" when Zira's arguments on evolution
come too close to the truth. Yet its real narrative purpose
is quite dark for a Hollywood film of any era, and all of
the puns and allusions are, after all, just window dressing
for a classical mythic structure. In one of the most stunning
and effective surprise endings of film history, "Planet of
the Apes" suggests the unthinkable for a mass entertainment
-- hey, human beings ARE a pestilence, and the universe is
mostly impervious to the problem, even if the advanced apes
are not.
The legendary
denouement is a great and enduring surprise because it IS
the story, it's the destination toward which the film has
been moving from it's very first moments, whether Taylor likes
it or not, whether the audience likes it or not (but, oh,
they did, they did). All mythic journeys end in home, and
their final revelations are not of the outer world, but of
the self (see "Oedipus Rex"). As a measure of the superlative
writing in this film, we need only think back to Taylor's
opening monologue (partially quoted above), when he is thinking
out loud for the ship's recorder just before the crash: "Seen
from out here, everything seems different. Time bends, space
is boundless. It squashes a man's ego. I feel lonely." That
is the emotion to which "Planet of the Apes" consistently
returns ad infinitum. The film is an existential cry of anguish
disguised as a surrealist comedy.
Heston
has one of the best roles of his career, bringing all of his
passionate theatricality to a film most movie stars of the
day would have shunned (and several did before he took the
role, among them Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster).
An earnest ensemble player, Heston's trademarked sincerity
makes him the perfect straight man for a crew of superb character
actors in ape finery: the dogmatic Dr. Zaius is played by
stage actor Maurice Evans, a renowned Shakespearean who made
few films in his lifetime, but who always chose good ones
(the same year as "Apes", he appeared as Hutch in Polanski's
"Rosemary's Baby"); the curious and understanding Zira is
played by Kim Hunter, who created the role of Stella in both
the stage and film versions of "A Streetcar Named Desire";
and former child star Roddy McDowall, who made his first film
at the age of ten, gives a subtle comic performance as Cornelius,
Zira's ambitious mate.
Savvy
use of the widescreen frame by director Schaffner, a fine
craftsman who, like Serling, was trained in the crucible of
live television drama (which means he worked fast and made
smart decisions under pressure). Schaffner appropriates many
techniques of the French New Wave for this film to marvelous
effect -- hand-held camera, disjointed montage, abrupt transitions,
using ambient sound as a second music score -- and he shoots
the action in real locations whenever possible, which gives
a dissonant sense of reality to what is essentially a dreamscape.
The actual
music score by Jerry Goldsmith is one of his best, filled
with ancient instruments and disturbing, otherworldly sounds.
Art director William Creber based his designs for the ape
village on troglodyte ruins, after it was decided the more
modern ape city of the book would be too expensive to reproduce.
The choice to set ape society in trappings reminiscent of
the human past allowed allusions to more than one era, and
opened the satire to its broad range of interpretations.
NOTES:
A new
DVD edition of the film is due in August, 2001.
MONKEY
SUITS: The ape makeup was a quantum leap for prosthetic
effects in its day, allowing the actors unprecedented freedom
for facial expression inside a mask. Though it has long since
been surpassed by the work of many technicians, most of whom
were brought up admiring this film; one thing is certain,
nothing on this scale had ever been attempted before. One-fifth
of the $5.8 million budget for "Planet of the Apes" went to
John Chambers' makeup department, which wound up hiring literally
every makeup artist in Hollywood and training hundreds more
of their own before the film could be finished, holding up
other productions for a couple of months in the summer of
'67.
IF
IT WORKS, RUN IT INTO THE GROUND: Followed by four sequels
of wildly uneven, generally sinking quality: "Beneath the
Planet of the Apes" (1970); "Escape from..." (1971); "Conquest
of..." (1972); and "Battle for..." (1973). Roddy McDowall
was the only actor to appear in all five films. Also spawned
two TV series: a live-action show for half a season in fall
1974 (with McDowall again!), and a Saturday morning cartoon
that ran from September 1975 to September 1976 called "Return
to the Planet of the Apes".
WHO
KNEW?: "Planet of the Apes" was the first science fiction
film to reach a wide audience, indicating a major shift in
the taste of moviegoers (if not moviemakers). Released about
three months before "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968, "Planet
of the Apes" was the higher grossing film of the two, taking
in $15 million and finishing 7th on Variety's list of the
year's box office winners.
The only
previous science fiction films to reach Variety's top 10 were
"20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1955), which made it more
because it was a Disney movie for the whole family than because
of its genre, and Stanley Kramer's "On the Beach" (1959),
because it was a serious drama no one recognized as, yuck,
science fiction (even though it was).
THE
WRITERS WERE ALL VETERANS: Pierre Boulle (b. 1912, d.
?) was a Free French guerilla and a POW in WWII. An engineer
in civilian life before he became a novelist, he had an international
success with his first book, "The Bridge on the River Kwai"
(1952), which later became one of the greatest of all antiwar
films. As a rule, he didn't write screenplays, at least not
in English, which becomes an important point concerning....
Michael
Wilson (b. 1914, d. 1978), who was an Oscar-winning adapter
(for "A Place in the Sun", 1951, based on Theodore Dreiser's
"An American Tragedy") when he was blacklisted during the
reign of McCarthyism, despite his honorable WWII service as
a Marine lieutenant. He continued to work for top directors
as an uncredited script doctor, or he collaborated with other
blacklisted writers using various pseudonyms. His screenplay
of "Bridge on the River Kwai" with Carl Foreman (also blacklisted)
won an Oscar under the assumed name of "Pierre Boulle".
The inimitable
Rod Serling (b. 1924, d. 1975) was a paratrooper during the
war. He achieved his first national recognition as a writer
for the teleplays "Patterns" and "Requiem for a Heavyweight",
both of which were produced as live TV dramas in the fifties.
He found his true niche in 1959 as the creator and head writer
of "The Twilight Zone", the famous anthology TV series which
presented terse, sometimes unforgettable tales of the fantastic
on minimal budgets, often with shocking surprise endings.
Serling became a household name as the show's wry and pitiless
host, writing more than 90 of the original 150-plus half-hours,
taking home 4 of his total 6 Emmys as a scribe. He later created
a second anthology series, "Night Gallery", which was less
successful thanks to network interference.
Although
it is uncertain who contributed what to the final screenplay
of "Planet of the Apes", because Wilson and Serling worked
separately on their own drafts, all agree that Serling invented
the "Statue of Liberty" ending, out of several variations
he had worked on the same theme in earlier versions. The entire
film is shot through with Serlingesque touches of prismatic
irony and dramatic poetry.
|
