Cinema: Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes “The monkey,” said Henry Ward Beecher, “is an organized sarcasm upon the human race.” The sarcasm is seldom allowed to speak for itself in this film about a space odyssey that goes awry and crash-lands three astronauts on an unknown planet. They have been traveling for a cool millennium or so, but their craft has been zooming along at close to the speed of light, and so—in accordance with Einstein’s Time-Dilation Theory—they have scarcely aged, save for some grey in their beards. At first, all they find is sand, but soon they stumble across a primitive tribe of mute cave people. “If this is the best they’ve got, we’ll be running this planet in three months,” smirks the skipper, played by Charlton Heston.

The best they’ve got, however, is not dumb men but clever monkeys, hideous primates in leather jackets who periodically catch humans in nets for laboratory experiments or to put in cages at the local zoo. Heston’s companions are quickly done in, and soon he is pleading for his life before the head orangutan (Maurice Evans), who wants him gelded and then melded into the tribe of cavemen. Aided by two empathetic chimpanzees (Roddy MacDowall and Kim Hunter), Heston eventually makes his escape across forbidden territory where no monkey hand has ever set foot. There he learns the dreadful secret of why evolution has been reversed, and why simians, not men, rule this most earthlike sphere.

The novel by Pierre Boulle (The Bridge on the River Kwai) about the conflict of man and monkey was a clever, abrasive piece of science friction. But on the screen the story has been reduced from Swiftian satire to self-parody. The script is cluttered with man-monkey analogies, as crude as “Human see, human do,” “I never met an ape I didn’t like” and “he was a gorilla to remember.” At one point, three of the simians simultaneously cover their eyes, ears and mouth. The best thing about the film results from Producer Arthur P. Jacobs’ decision to allocate $1,000,000 for masks and costumes. The makeup boys have given him his money’s worth with the most beastly metamorphoses since Lon Chaney moonlighted as the Wolf Man.