Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972, J. Lee Thompson)

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is about a bunch of ape slaves overpowering their human masters. Any film with a thirty second recap of the previous sequel by Ricardo Montalban has to be at least amusing, but Conquest is actually better than amusing (until the actual revolt begins). Since the film didn’t have any real budget, it shot entirely (I think entirely) at Fox’s then-new Century City complex–because it looked future-like. The film opens with a great fifteen or twenty minute, almost real-time sequence of Ricardo Montalban walking around with Roddy McDowell’s talking ape. Bruce Surtees shot Conquest and it’s a beautiful looking film. Director J. Lee Thompson does well in the confines too, making Century City’s stark impersonality look interesting. Montalban owns those first twenty minutes and sets the film up better than it turns out.

The problem is the eventual slave revolt. The acting is excellent across the board–Hari Rhodes as the sympathetic black guy (since Conquest is from 1972, there’s a lot more racial honesty than I’ve seen in a film in years), Severn Darden as the bad guy, and Don Murray as the sort-of bad guy. Murray’s got a few mouthfuls of exposition to get out and, while he doesn’t get them out as well as Montalban, he still does an admirable job. Paul Dehn wrote Conquest (he also wrote the unspeakably awful Beneath and the superior Escape) and he does layer some complexities into the characters, Murray’s especially. Unfortunately, Dehn doesn’t give McDowell as the ape leader any complexity. Once the revolt starts, the film becomes visually dynamic–to a point–the scenes of the revolt are good, but the dramatic thrust of the film is gone. Since the ending is predetermined for a large part, there’s not much interesting going on.

McDowell’s the film’s second biggest problem. His character makes a huge transition in addition to going from being the protagonist to being the subject of Conquest and he doesn’t pull it off. That failing isn’t really McDowell’s, but the script’s. There’s only so much one could do with a film like Conquest–first, that predetermined outcome, second, the single talking ape (as opposed to… I don’t know, two. Two would have done it), and then the cast of human characters. Conquest doesn’t pull many punches about whose side it’s own either. There are a bunch of white guys in jack-boots and SS outfits giving black people shit and beating defenseless animals. There’s a visual metaphor, but it doesn’t go much further, which is kind of nice. Conquest needed to embrace what it had more, instead of working blindly toward its ending. Still, it’s a great looking film. Thompson’s use of the limited set, along with Surtees’s lighting, is beautiful.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971, Don Taylor)

I occasionally–or often, depending on the films I’m going through–start a post saying how much I was dreading the film and how well it turned out. Usually, these are films I used to love and haven’t seen in ten years and was worried about them. I wasn’t dreading Escape from the Planet of the Apes, I was wholly anticipating suffering for ninety minutes. I rented the Apes box set from Nicheflix and, after the first two–especially the second one, since Paul Dehn wrote both it and this film–I was desperate to avoid Escape, to avoid continuing the series. I rented it on a lark anyhow, just because Nicheflix’s price was great for six movies.

For those who don’t know, who somehow missed Escape on TV every other weekend throughout the 1990s, it takes place in modernity (1973), and features Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter (as the apes from the first two movies). They travel back in time. Nicely, the film doesn’t even bother getting into the “science” of it, not even wasting time on that sort of puffery. Not to say Escape is a lean film. The first couple acts are lean, but towards the end it starts to drag. Roddy McDowell really impresses in this film, while Kim Hunter doesn’t quite work. She has more to do and the audience is supposed to be sympathetic towards her because of the other movies. McDowell isn’t treated so nonchalantly and he provides a funny and touching performance.

But Escape doesn’t work because of the apes, it works because of the people. This film is not a serious rumination on time traveling apes. It’s a somewhat serious film, but it knows how to get the audience going, but engaging their expectations for future apes in modernity. There’s a hilarious montage of the two going around and getting dressed up (speaking all the latest colloquialisms too). It’s got a playful 1970s Jerry Goldsmith score, probably the most playful thing I’ve ever heard from him (and the best) and a lot of the film is just about having fun. Maybe not laughing out loud, but being amused. The serious parts come when the filmmakers realized they needed a conclusion, so some scientist decides the apes need to go. The scientist, played by Eric Braeden, gives the best performance in the film. Escape introduces some real internal conflict into the film series–because the scientist goes nuts and he gets it. He recognizes he’s lost it.

There are some other good performances, mostly smaller ones (Ricardo Montalban has a fun cameo and William Windom is good). The secondary male lead, Bradford Dillman, is good too, but his character is nice and nothing more.

The direction (by Don Taylor) seems bigger than the first two films in the series, which it shouldn’t. It feels more epic, but it’s really just in that early 1970s style, when extreme long shots were big in mainstream movies. A lot of it looks like a TV show, but a good one. Taylor also gets the humor and knows how to direct the audience’s attention to it without having to bonk them over the head.

I’m not sure at what point during the film I realized it was actually successful and good, but it didn’t take too long. From the opening credits, it becomes obvious it’s going to be entertaining, and while Kim Hunter’s failure to create a truly sympathetic character hurts it, Braeden makes up for that absence but giving the film a great antagonist. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it’d be understandable to anyone who hasn’t seen the first two films… However, it might actually be worth it for Escape.

Planet of the Apes (1968, Franklin J. Schaffner)

Planet of the Apes is, I’m fairly sure, the first film I’ve ever watched and known the director started in television. Franklin J. Schaffner has a lot of dynamic shots–helicopter shots, three dimensional motion and camera movement (which is rarer than one would think)–but none of them go together. It’s like watching a different movie every cut. There are also definite commercial breaks in the film and the first hour, until Charlton Heston speaks to the apes, is really a fifteen minute teaser drawn out with a lot of monologues, walking, and chase scenes.

When I started watching the film, I marveled at how bad Charlton Heston’s performance is. He actually gets better, but it’s one of those cases of not knowing if he actually gets better or if the viewer has just been conditioned to his performance. It’s kind of funny, though, to see über-Conservative Heston in a role basically advocating (small c) communism. That correlation is about the only one I could pull out of Planet of the Apes and I had to use a big pair of pliers. We’ve gotten used to seeing science fiction as metaphor and there’s none of it in Apes. It’s an incredibly straightforward approach, which could work well in the film’s favor, if it wasn’t so inconsistent with its characters and generally dumb.

The problem with the film–its stupidity–is in the package. The film asks the viewer to accept this ape civilization–a planet–which doesn’t seem to be larger than a city, doesn’t know anything about science except has verbose scientific terminology (how did they learn them?) and has working firearms–lots of them–but supposedly is opposed to killing. The characters, with the exception of Heston and the two good apes, flip back and forth, the worst being Maurice Evans’s. He goes from being the big bad guy, to just a guy, to sort of a good guy, to a bad guy, to just a guy. Or ape. Whatever. I think he’s supposed to be an orangutan, actually. He generally changes character between commercial breaks (oh, and Schaffner doesn’t know how to do establishing shots). The film’s about ideas (and running) and getting them presented is the only important thing.

Once the movie gets to the end and Heston’s wailing in the surf, I realized it actually could have worked. There was a big thing–during the opening, the twenty minute walk–about Heston wanting to get off the planet Earth because he hated the way things were going (war–yes, this film does actually star Charlton Heston and it has a big anti-war message, one about 150 feet tall). Anyway, there’s a metaphor there, about Heston returning to the Earth he dreaded, where everything he feared had come to pass, and so on and so on. I wouldn’t want to write it, but I would have wanted to see it. Or, at least, I know it’d have been better than what they did.