“Get your stinking paws off of me, you damned dirty ape!”
There are classic movie lines and then there are lines delivered by Charlton Heston to talking apes. The latter is pretty unbeatable. From that iconic moment when the apes realize that Bright Eyes, aka Taylor, aka Chuck Heston, can talk to his fist pounding damning of the human race to hell for destroying everything, there isn’t a lot about the original 1968 original classic, Planet of the Apes, that isn’t known to viewers these days so spoiler warnings seem about as necessary as a “No Diving” sign over a lava pit. Nevertheless, there are those lucky few who haven’t seen it yet and an even luckier few who don’t actually know the big final twist that comes in the last scene of the movie. So, all things considered, SPOILER WARNING. Let us now delve into the wonder that is Franklin Schaffner’s 1968 sci-fi marvel, Planet of the Apes, playing this weekend in theaters around the country, courtesy of Fathom Entertainment and Turner Classic Movies.
When Pierre Boule wrote La planete des singes in 1963, he didn’t anticipate in would become one of the most successful sci-fi franchises in Hollywood history. In fact, he didn’t even think it could be made into a movie at all. If you’ve read the book, you know it’s quite a bit different from the movie. So different, in fact, that they could have made a few more name changes and ostensibly not credited Boulle’s book at all, saying that they were simply employing a similar theme. In the book, there is no group of military astronauts but instead a couple of scientists and a journalist named Ulysses who is the character that Chuck Heston’s Taylor stands in for. Not only are Ulysses’ experiences vastly different (with Cornelius and Zira’s help he even gets to make a speech to all of ape-dom, is granted freedom, and get his own special clothes to wear) but his story is not even necessarily real. How so? In the book, the story is told via a couple, Jinn and Phyllis, who are taking a sailing trip through space and, as might happen to a ship on the ocean, come across a message in a bottle. In this case, it’s the full story typed out (dictated?) by Ulysses about everything that happened to him and his companions on their fateful trip to Soror, the planet of the apes.
Ulysses describes a world much like the one we see in the movie version, as far as the order of the apes is concerned, but far more advanced technologically. Also, as with Taylor in the movie, Ulysses is setup as a mate for Nova. Unlike the movie, he and Nova have a child and determine to escape the planet on an experimental rocket (told you they more advanced). Here’s where the book sets up its double twist ending. First, Ulysses, Nova, and Sirius, their son, travel back to earth and land in Paris only to be greeted by a military officer who also happens to be a gorilla. It’s a little like the twist ending of Tim Burton version, sort of. The second twist comes when that story ends and we return to Jinn and Phyllis who find the whole story ludicrous and unbelievable. You see, Jinn and Phyllis are intelligent and sensible chimpanzees who would never fall for such an obvious fantasy.
Now, that’s a movie I wouldn’t mind seeing. I’m not sure how you would hide the fact that Jinn and Phyllis are chimpanzees from the audience without making it too obvious that they’re being hidden. Too obvious and it might give the game away right at the start so I understand why eliminating the framing device was the first thing screenwriters Rod Serling and Michael Wilson did. After that, they had to mold the screenplay around Charlton Heston who was the person pushing the project along. He had wanted to do a movie of it the moment he read the translated version, Monkey Planet, in 1964, and even did screen tests with his friend Edward G. Robinson, who appears in rudimentary makeup as Dr. Zeus. In the screen tests, Zeus works with Heston’s character in much the way Ulysses works with Cornelius in the book after Cornelius excavates the remains of a human civilization. In other words, it’s not antagonistic as it is in the movie, and the two work together to understand how human civilization failed.
The screen tests end there but they were good enough to get the project greenlit and Rod Serling, fresh from mega-stardom as the host and creator of the hit series The Twilight Zone, was brought on to write. His screenplay changed Ulysses from a journalist to a military man and the name to Taylor, George Taylor. In the book, there’s never a moment when Ulysses can’t speak. The problem he has at first is that the apes speak a different language, which would make sense if it was a different species on a different planet. In the movie, the apes speak English and Taylor has his throat shot so they don’t know he can speak until it heals and we get that amazing moment referenced at the top of this piece. And, of course, he changed the ending. Taylor doesn’t fly back home. Instead, he realizes he never left. He’s on earth and the ape dominant society is a result of man’s endless capacity to destroy itself.
The movie was a smash hit and later had four sequels that performed the amazing feat of looping the story back in on itself. That is to say, Taylor and his crew fly through space and time to the planet, are then followed by another crew in the second movie leading to the destruction of the planet via doomsday device, but not before Cornelius and Zira fix the spaceship and rocket into space, travel back in time to earth, have a baby, Caesar, who talks and starts the revolution that leads to the planet being taken over by apes which is the planet that Taylor lands on. Essentially, the planet that only exists in the way it does because Taylor landed on it in the first place.
Later, there was a tv series, an animated show, the aforementioned lousy Tim Burton reboot, and a lackluster second reboot and sequel that, while keeping the idea going, still doesn’t quite match the original. And the cast is a big part of the reason. Edward G. Robinson never made the movie because he couldn’t handle the intensive makeup sessions, but Heston did and, I’ll be honest: As much as I like the idea of the sequels, the main reason they don’t interest me as much as the original is the lack of Heston. He’s in the second one, briefly, but his presence in the first one is the key to its success. Few actors had the skill to portray the kind of stoic arrogance that Taylor needs in spades and makes the character work so well. Add to Heston fellow thespians Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall, and Maurice Evans, and you’ve got a cast that makes the movie, a movie that would have succeeded anyway but not as well. Sterling’s screenplay has the same heavy-handed messaging that plagued The Twilight Zone but Heston and company have the skill to make it work. The Planet of the Apes came out in the same year as 2001: A Space Odyssey and with that movie, legitimized science fiction in a way it hadn’t been done before. It wasn’t quite the head trip of 2001 but it entertained audiences a lot more and today, it’s still one of the best science fiction movies Hollywood has ever made. I bet even Jinn and Phyllis, being sensible chimps and all, would agree on that.