Planet of the Apes (1968)—This adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s Monkey Planet is a classic of austere, moody sci-fi satire. Charlton Heston is at his spitting-mad best as an astronaut who’s crash-landed on a planet where apes talk and humans don’t. His indignant fury at being manhandled by the simian set seems perfectly sincere. His costars Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter & Roddy McDowall actually manage to give expressive performances through the then-state-of-the-art makeup of John Chambers.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)—The first sequel—a clash between the warlike apes & a race of grotesque, telepathic, nuclear-bomb-worshipping mutants living under the ruins of NYC, with the humans caught in between—is perhaps the creepiest & harshest of the series, but it’s also imaginative & grimly funny. I‘ve always had a perverse fondness for this weird, downbeat movie, maybe because it was my first Apes experience, or maybe because I had the Gold Key tie-in comic-book version. A pity I read it to tatters back then; it now goes for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
It came with your very own “Ape Protest Poster”:
Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971)—Chimpanzees Roddy McDowall & Kim Hunter use Heston’s spaceship to go back in time to America of the early ‘70s. They’re celebrated at first, but Hunter finds she’s pregnant, fear of an ape planet sets in among the humans, & tragic trouble ensues. A highlight of this one is Ricardo Montalban, oozing courtliness as a gallant circus owner.
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)—By the 1990s, apes are a slave class in America, until the articulate young chimp Caesar (McDowall yet again) rises to lead the revolution. This wild piece of agitprop is the chapter which most closely corresponds to the new film.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)—The final sequel of the original series—though short-lived live-action & cartoon TV shows would follow—shows how the human-simian rift was averted. It ends with humans & apes living in harmony, like in a cross-species Benetton ad.
Re-watching these movies, what’s odd is how much fun we found them as kids, despite their curmudgeonly misanthropy. They were about the persistence of war, oppression, bigotry, fanaticism, clannishness, anti-intellectualism & murderous paranoia, & most of them ended tragically. Even the optimism of the closing chapter was wistful & wary; their critique of humanity was irksomely hard to refute.
What made them lovable, I think, is that their cynical pessimism, though darkly comic, was never gleeful—their outrage at human folly was heartfelt. These movies may have seen a peaceful, decent future as a long shot, but they didn’t mock it as an ideal.
