With the sugary Fruit Loops of Summer movie fare already upon us, this week on Fabulous Film & Friends we are going to fortify our intellectual palate with some meaty, heavy-duty late 60’s early/70’s sci fi and compare Franklin Schaffner’s 1968 masterpiece Planet of The Apes, starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, Linda Harrison and James Whitmore with Richard Fleischer’s 1973 downbeat detective story Soylent Green also starring Mr. Heston, along with Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young, Brock Peters, Chuck Connors and Dick Van Patten in a role he was born to play as a weaselly usher in a walk in euthanasia center.
Joining me as we venture down this dark path of 70’s dystopia are series regulars David Johnson D.M.D, Roseanne Caputi, author, producer and NY resident George Young and the mighty Gordon Alex Robertson.
But before we take the first bite: the synopses.
Planet of the Apes centers around George Taylor, an astronaut on a deep space voyage whose mission entails returning to Earth 2000 years after the launch of the spacecraft. The vessel crash lands on what seems to be a far off planet inhabited by by dumb and mute humans who are ruled by intelligent but brutal talking apes. Taylor is captured by the apes and shot in the throat making him unable to talk, but when his larynx heals, he lets out the immortal line, “Get your paws off of me you damned dirty ape!” What follows is a tug of war over the perceived intelligence and fading dominance of mankind, leading Taylor to discover the shocking truth of his predicament on the planet.
Soylent Green takes place in what was once the future, the year 2022 where in a poisoned world with very little food and clean water, much of the overpopulated humanity living in squalid apartments and packed shoulder to shoulder, sleeping on stairwells, feeds on a government issued allegedly plankton-based food product called Soylent Green. Scuffling and sweaty Detective Robert Thorn is assigned a murder case where a wealthy power master named William Simonson was assassinated. Thorn follows a trail of murderous clues that lead him to the discovery of the exact nature Soylent Green itself.