None of us at Film Club would argue that Franklin Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes is the best movie of the late 1960s or even one of the best. There are too many remarkable films from the period between 1967 and 1970: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, In the Heat of the Night, M*A*S*H, Patton. We could go on. So it’s easy to dismiss Planet of the Apes as simple sci-fi, post-apocalyptic cheese with Charlton Heston chewing scenery, not unlike Richard Fleischer’s topical sci-fi of the year before, Fantastic Voyage. But upon a bit deeper reflection, while it may not be the best, it might be the most reflective film of its time.
The late ‘60s were a period of upheaval in American life – politically, generationally, racially, culturally. The politics of the time were dominated, of course, by the Viet Nam war. Planet divides its ape community into three parts – chimpanzees (a sort of youthful simian middle-class), orangutans (the elder, wise men and law-makers), and gorillas (the warriors). Each of these also presents an allegorical version of contemporary American society: the idealistic students, the government, and the military. So it’s more than a moment of narrative tension when Schaffner stages chimpanzees protesting, with radical Berkeley-esque fervor and signage, decisions by the orangutan rulers. If you see the reference, then the film becomes part of the anti-war conversation.
We can make a similar connection if we think about what the movie has to say about the rise of youth culture. The two principles in the film, Cornelius (played by Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter), not only present youth as heroic (in the face of intransigent and entrenched policy-making and brutal militarism) but also represent it as far more reasonable than their other ape counterparts. Their idealism, their questioning, their anti-authoritarianism all come at moments when it is just to be so.
Like the drama over Viet Nam, the U.S. also was in the heat of the civil rights movement. Ask yourself, as you watch, what Schaffner is suggesting about race and where he makes specific reference to contemporary social attitudes. Are the apes and humans, two different species, just a stand-in for the different races? Does the film support or caution the viewer about America’s growing black militancy?
Schaffner also uses his film to mine a growing mistrust of religious fundamentalism. It’s evident in the scriptural foundation of the ape community’s laws, and their hypocrisy about challenges to that scripture. It’s also evident in the clear Darwinian attitude about evolution and social advancement. Ask yourself how religion is specifically depicted? What happens to its icons? The more we dig into this film, the less it seems like science fiction. After all, what technological “what if” is really in question here? Yes, our hero, Taylor (Charlton Heston), is an astronaut who pilots a space ship through time and to an unknown place, but the film really has nothing to do with this exploration or its vision of man’s exploratory future. The film focuses first and foremost on the clash of cultures – both ape/human and within the ape society – after Taylor crash lands on the planet.
And none of this is to forget the film’s iconic moment of irony, a statement itself that is more about culture than science or technology or space ships. So, when Heston utters his famous line at the end of the film, can we still hear it now, 32 years later, for the warning it was to the community watching in the seats? Questions worth asking. It’s always impressive to us that films from this period, even the cheesy ones, seem so much more socially relevant than those we get today.
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
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