Planet of the Apes

PLANET OF THE APES (1968)

White man's burden, white man's shmurden. The strongest film about race relations was made almost thirty years ago, and still brandishes a cattle prod of impact. Yep, the first and the best of the apes flicks, like the original King Kong, seems to be a film Photo op over a dead man

that has more on its mind that just adventure and thrills (and like Kong, the well-timed entrance of the title character(s) still makes the hairs on my arms stand on end). Token black astronaut aside (notice how he's the only black guy in the picture? All the other humans in the fore-and background are white), the film shows whites in slave collars and caged wagons, beaten and sleeping on straw, as corpses stacked in piles and hanging from sticks; treated, in short, as black slaves were in the deep South. Once this idea occurs, It becomes excruciatingly hard to watch the first appearance of the apes, jet black gorillas herding and killing white people in rags. Although the film goes on to push around other subjects with varying degrees of success, it comes back again and again to images of Charlton Heston being chased and beaten, treated continually with revulsion and contempt, perpetually humiliated and then told by his ape protectors to behave. It's a snapshot of the paranoia engine that runs at the core of white American culture, the secret fear of how blacks might treat whites if they were in control, taken without apology and without solution. Heston a real shitheel.

unapologetically plays his character with rage and scorn, a real shitheel, mocking his fellow astronauts, lording it over the planet's other humans, and patronizing his ape protectors. He mellows a bit as the movie goes on, but at the core of it is a character that must have shocked the NASA loving America of 1968: the astronaut as thug. It makes the concerns of this movie all the more important: Heston's Taylor is no innocent martyr. He is as guilty of everything that the didactic Dr. Zaius says he is. Think what you will about the rifle-toting Republican S.O.B., Heston's performance in this (and his insistence on Orson Welles directing Touch of Evil ) will keep him remembered by cineastes far longer than old what's-his-name who was President back in the 80's. Expect any 90's remake to be completely spineless by comparison (unless they get Abel Ferrara or the Hughes Brothers to make it).

More about this movie