An episode of The Simpsons shown during last week has Selma marry Troy McClure (you may remember him from such things as...) who subsequently gets the Charlton Heston role in a musical theatre version of Planet of The Apes. It's an excellent episode and the rendition of Falco's Rock Me Amadeus 'Dr Zaius, Dr Zaius' is brilliantly memorable - if not annoyingly so!
Having seen this it seemed apt to re-watch the original film, which I hadn't watched for a few years now and my wife had never seen. I recalled being struck by the bleakness of the early part of the film and the long scenes and landscape pans which I don't think you'd get nowadays with Hollywood's penchant for pace and continuous cutting. I appreciated all that again this time, and the fact that it's nearly 25 minutes in before you see anyone other than the spaceship crew, but what struck me most this time was what an unsavoury, posturing caricature Charlton Heston is - and I can't understand why I'd never realised it before!
Turner's an American 'jock', a braggart, clearly perceptive and intelligent; basically one of those guys who's good at sports and just about everything, and gets lots of sex to boot - the rest of us can only despise him. While he drags on his cigars and tells his fellow crewmen why they're crap and he isn't the viewer can only imagine the hell of being stuck on a long space journey with this person who is less a character and more a collection of opinions and role-playing characteristics performed with gusto, great teeth and pert buttocks.
Poor old Landon - he's the interesting one, the guy who didn't want to go but didn't have the guts not to go; the one who's missing his family and has to suffer unrealistic facial hair and what increasingly looks like a toupee the longer he stays on screen. He gets lobotomised, while the other crewmember, Dodge, ends up as a taxidermist's model on display in one of the film's most unsettling scenes. But they're not box office are they - or at least they weren't in 1968. The world wants to see macho, the world wants to see Charlton Heston in a loin cloth.
There's hardly a single line of Taylor's dialogue (either clothed or unclothed) that's driven with any believable emotion or passion. This is clear from the film's two most famous lines:
'Take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape!' which, as my wife pointed out, was not the most sensible thing he could have said at the time, and
'You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!'
Or maybe with the second quote it's just the way he delivers it? Internalised it might have been very strong, but he yells it like he expects the Statue of Liberty to agree with him.
His bragging about women while he's imprisoned is uncomfortable listening now, whereas I'm sure in the mysogynist late 60s it was fine - although his thoughts on how Ms Stuart may have ended up being 'used' by her three 'Adams' if she'd survived the journey is presumably more perceptive than NASA's when they sent a crew of three middle-aged males and one youthful, attractive blonde female. He's not too randy a bugger though - he seems to be waiting for after the end of the film before he shows Nova his manliness. He won't mate on demand for the enjoyment of the apes, but he still keeps his 'woman' close by for the remainder, in case he does get the urge. That's good forward planning.
Watching Turner as he postures around the bleak landscape, all tanned and grinning his perfect teeth, golden locks a-flowing, it suddenly occurred to me that he looks like a combination of all the Bee Gees rolled into one. The only possible conclusion from this is that the brothers Gibb saw Planet of The Apes around the time of its original release and decided that this was the look for them when they re-invented themselves in the mid-70s. Therefore disco can be completely blamed on Charlton Heston.
Overall it's a highly entertaining film - but possibly not for the reasons Franklin J. Schaffner intended. Turner character and dialogue aside, the apes look excellent and are surprisingly expressive and facially characterful. Occasionally Roddy McDowell sounds like he's talking out of a rubber mask but Kim Hunter and Maurice Evans never do and are particularly good.
I guess the best thing about the film is the cinematography. It looks gorgeous, it's all so bleak and ravaged and hopeless - although if that's only 1200 years in the future you'd expect there to be more signs of man's previous existence seeing we've made such an impact on our environment. Perhaps our downfall was a natural one, which returned the planet to a more pure, natural state? If so that would hint that man was not the architect of his own downfall, which is what the film suggests.
Certainly you wouldn't expect a civilisation made up of Turners to survive - after all, once they've shagged all the good looking women and smoked all the cigars and run out of 'nerds' to bully, what else are they going to do but blow themselves up?!
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