The beginning of a strange journey…a journey to find the keys to the past and the present…a journey to a land where APES SPEAK LIKE MEN…
“How is it that this film became a classic?” My Lovely Wife (who I have quite a few years on) asked during one of its more ham-handed scenes—and man, does 1968’s Planet of the Apes have some ham-handed scenes. From Heston’s “I’m lonely” monologue right off the bat, to his philosophical argumens with his fellow astronauts, to his tribunal to…well, everything. Rod Serling could be fairly insufferably obvious in the half-hour format, but give him a full-fledged feature allegory and he really goes nuts. (I know that Michael Wilson’s credited as a co-writer of the screenplay, adapted from Pierre Boulle’s novel. But Serling’s pawprints all but obliterate whatever contribution he made.)
To get back to My Lovely Wife’s question. It came at a particularly wince-worthy bit (the “three monkeys” gag at Taylor’s “trial’). “Well, you know, it was the times, a lot of unrest, a lot of racial stuff…” And after a bit of fumbling it occurred to me that I really didn’t know. But then again of course I did. I picked up the remote and skipped ahead a few chapters on the new Blu-ray DVD.
“This is why it’s a classic,” said I. Other movies had gone for the apocalyptic punchline before, but no other film had nailed it quite so, well, mercilessly as this one. It blew my little nine-year-old mind when I first saw it, and the minds of plenty of adults as well. When I’d overhear grownups talking about it with people who hadn’t seen it, the dynamic was pretty funny, because those who had seen the film were dying to tell.
Of course, the nine-year-old me thought that the film’s social observations leading up to the finale were super-profound. I’m certainly not alone. For a lot of people, Apes belongs in that very special, peculiar category of film appreciation: a movie you always loves despite knowing it’s not much good.
The Blu-ray of the film is outstanding—a startling image retaining much movie-like quality (that’s real film grain in the upper-right-hand corner of the first screen shot). Dazzling, but not in that digital-data way at all. The sound is also fantastic (Jerry Goldsmith’s score, which is justifiably a classic, is probably the most genuinely sophisticated element of the picture), and the extras pretty much repeat the voluminous stuff that’ appeared on prior editions.
UPDATE: Joseph Failla, with whom I saw the film as a nine-year-old, weighs in below. Let me mention that I, too, am pretty high on Beneath:
It didn’t really matter if you knew the ending was coming, the Statue of Liberty finale was devastatingly profound (and not just for 9 year olds). The Rod Serling connection between TZ and Apes was pretty easy to make and his script works better than the book’s conclusion, which is not nearly as dramatic. Remember in Boulle’s novel Bridge on the River Kwai the bridge never actually blows up (although it makes sense not to), the film version gives the audience the release it needs. Coming in ’68, Apes played more coherently to everyone who was confused by that year’s other great sci-fi, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and in their own way, both film’s conclusions were just as mind blowing.
Plus the spectacle of seeing Moses, Ben Hur and El Cid (in the presence of Heston) being mistreated and helpless at the hands of those “damn dirty apes” was just too ironic for anyone to resist. And I haven’t even mentioned the revolutionary make up effects by John Chambers or the innovative Jerry Goldsmith score (listen to those artificial monkey sounds!). And BTW, as I understand, the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” sight gag was an on the spot addition and not part of Serling’s script. Regardless, it never fails to get a big laugh.
But perhaps the question shouldn’t be why is Planet of the Apes a great film, but how the heck did they manage to make 4 successful sequels out of such depressing material? As someone who admits going “ape for a day” by sitting through all 5 Ape films theatrically in one long, marathon afternoon and evening back in ’73, I can attest to the strange pull this apocalyptic series (the world ends twice!) had on young kids of the era. Coming between Space Odyssey and Star Wars, the Apes films remain for those of a certain age (of which you and I qualify) the missing link between those masterpieces. The thing is they’re so popular despite the incredible downer of the sequels distressing endings. Particularly Beneath’s doomsday scenario with it bomb worshipping, radiation scarred mutants. (And his was rated G!) It’s final nuclear white out always managed to freak me out and perhaps if the series ended there, we could compare the two endings for their potency but the suffering wasn’t over yet. Escape and Conquest inventively continue the series with a little time traveling slight of hand, only to conclude with the murder of two of the surviving sympathetic simian characters and a full scale ape revolt against their human masters. What was so memorable was how we all cheered the ape guerilla army on, no matter how many people they killed along the way. We were clearly on the side of the oppressed, ape or human.
Here’s that Twilight Zone / POTA mash-up I mentioned last night: http://theforbidden-zone.com/media/tzone.shtml
Personally, I’ve always preferred the third film (Escape From…) and the fourth (Conquest Of…) to the original. Bringing the intelligent apes back to our “present” pushes the racism/xenophobia subtext right to the forefront, and the follow-up which shows HOW the apes took over is actually pretty intense. The endings of both films are just as cynical and chilling as the original’s money shot. Roddy McDowell gets better with each installment (changing roles here between the two films), and both have, you know, MONTALBAN.
One of the few series of films that didn’t follow the diminishing returns route, though the final installment (Battle For…) is pretty hard to defend.
The TV show wasn’t bad, either.
As a historically deprived young ‘un, it’s actually pretty OK. It’s got decent tension between the dated-but-revealing elements and the actually clever stuff. Plus I’m still weighing the potential merits of Franklin J. Schaffner, auteur. No, really…
This film is eminently defensible, as is the rest of the series (maybe with the exception of “Battle”). The first film works on multiple levels, be it an allegory (which is the most obvious), misanthropic nihilism, a commentary on Heston’s predilection on playing messianic protagonists (as Failla points out), apocalyptic forewarning, or even something as simple as a ripping time-travel sci-fi yarn (more airtight than the “Back to the Future” flicks, for sure).
And it has one of the most unique protagonists found in movies up to that point (please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this one because I really am interested in finding out). Taylor is one of two misanthropic protagonists I remember (the other being Jimmy Stewart’s Rupert Cadell from “Rope”) that is then forced to defend humanity’s virtues in order to prevail in his role as hero.
For me, Planet of the Apes resides in a different, but equally special and peculiar category of film appreciation: a movie whose virtues I can see (kind of) but I still hates it. Bored the stuffing out of me, Charlton or no Charlton.
EXCEPT, of course, that ending, which really does make the whole goddamn movie. Absolutely Glenn, it’s one of the most kick-ass, twist-of-the-knife finales any of us will ever see.
Tony, I like your comparison of Heston in “Apes” and Stewart in “Rope”. I’ll have to watch “Apes” again with that in mind, as it’s been a very long time.
I’ve love the series, more from nostalgia than anything else. I grew up in Phoenix, and when I was a kid there was a Saturday morning movie series called “The Great Beyond”. They mostly showed old horror and sci fi movies, everything from Val Lewton and the Universal horror pictures to the Hammer movies to THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS to Roger Corman. The Planet movies were shown regularly, and my mom and I would watch them every time. Even though I own them on DVD, I only watch them when we’re visiting my parents and one happen to pop up on TV. The movies themselves have always been one of those things that I loved as a kid, but looking back at 34 I just can’t see what I saw as a eight year old. Instead of being just good stories, the racist/xenophobic subtext that lazarus refers to is like a hammer to the head. The movies try to hard to be socially conscious and meaningful to the times. I was oblivious to it at the time, but it cringe inducing now.
I love the way Heston says “Space is… bound-less” in his opening soliloquy. I have a soft spot in my heart for these movies, which were the closest thing I had to a serial experience in my childhood. Hammer’s Dracula, Frankenstein and Mummy movies may have been sequels but weren’t often sequential. I can remember taking a tape recorder to the drive-in with me when I saw CONQUEST and replaying Caesar’s revolutionary speech all the way home. “And where there is fire, there is smoke. And in that smoke, from this day forward…”
The fifth film is actually conspicuously more entertaining in its longer cut, which (unless I’m mistaken, I’m not morbid about the Apes films) remains available only as part of a Japanese laserdisc set.
I agree the original Planet of the Apes is a classic (Jerry Goldsmith single handedly change film music forever with this picture). However, I always found its first sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes the most ambition of the series in both its story and imagery. And certainly not wanting to take anything away from Roddy McDowall’s and Kim Hunter’s contributions to the series, but it is James Gregory’s menacing performance of General Ursus (INVADE. INVADE. INVADE) that still stays with me today.
Funny how quickly the Tim Burton remake as dropped from everybody’s memory. And interesting that Charlton Heston was pretty much the only A‑list actor of the time who took science fiction seriously. Not just SF, but usually downbeat, dystopian stuff like “Soylent Green” and “The Omega Man.”
When Heston went on his jihad against rap music and claimed “Cop Killer” was bad because of its nihilistic message, I wondered why nobody asked him to justify blowing up the world at the end of “Beneath.”
Tim, I’m pretty sure the current DVD release of Battle For… IS the extended cut, though IMDB only shows it as being three minutes longer (96 min) than the theatrical version. The UK theatrical release was 86 min, which is why some may think that Japanese version is 10 min longer. I’m not sure how much better it could be with just a few minutes added, but I need to see it again anyway.
As black kids who devoured the Apes films whenever they showed up on local TV in the ’70s and ’80s, my siblings and I just dug the thinly veiled Black Panther iconography. There is nothing on this earth cooler than gorillas in leather vests charging on horseback. The cropped, contrasty, poorly telecined prints you were apt to see back then just gave the visual metaphors that much more stark, graphic punch. Like a Che or X silk screen tee come to life.
But, yeah, Serling was not Mr. Subtle. The film is beloved mainly for that ending and a pleasing convergence of concept, art direction, costume design, widescreen lensing and Goldsmith’s jungle gym score.
I re-watched the five PotA films on AMC over Thanksgiving weekend after having avoided them for a few years (overexposure, don’t you know). I was surprised at how bitter and sardonic the original film is – it leaves us almost nothing to hang on to, obviously, but the fact that the ape civilization plays as a sad, cruel joke on humanity really surprised me. “Beneath” left me cold: visually flat and prone to “Aliens” syndrome, i.e., a virtual remake of the first film with increasingly outré elements piled on in order to distract from uninspired plotting. “Escape,” which I’d previously hated, struck me this time as a return to form – jokey, borderline camp for sure, but true to the tone of the original and just as scathing. The series could’ve ended there, with that weird, made-up real chimp blabbering “mama” over and over, but “Conquest” is still my favorite due to its unremitting bleakness (the tacked-on ending notwithstanding). “Battle” I still can’t stand; it’s like the fifth season of “The Wire” – pointless, empty, and dull, and John Huston ain’t no Montalban.