April of the Apes: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

I mentioned last week that Planet of the Apes felt like a spiritual successor to the Universal Classic Monsters, with prodigious makeup effects and a weighty morality fable. Imagine my surprise, then, to cue up Beneath the Planet of the Apes and find the film begins with a five-minute recap, reairing the least forgettable moment of the original film – the ending. The recap reel was a feature in too many of the Universal Monsters features to count, and that feeling of déjà vu persists into the film itself, which repeats so much of what we have already seen; as Pink Floyd once said, isn’t this where we came in?

Beneath the Planet of the Apes picks up moments after Taylor (Charlton Heston) and Nova (Linda Harrison) make their fateful discovery in the Forbidden Zone. Just as Taylor disappears, a second spacecraft lands, bringing astronaut Brent (James Franciscus) to the planet of the apes. While Brent sets off in search of Taylor, aided by the chimpanzee scientists Cornelius and Zira (David Watson, Kim Hunter), Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) and General Ursus (James Gregory) mount an expedition into the Forbidden Zone in search of food. What they find in the Forbidden Zone, though, is worse than starvation – a horrible reminder of what created this planet in the first place.

 

Devising a sequel to Planet of the Apes would have been an unwelcome challenge for nearly anyone. Rod Serling and original novelist Pierre Boulle both took a stab at it, their pitches ultimately rejected by the studio. (Serling made several pitches, some involving a second crew of astronauts and a second time/space voyage for Taylor, while Boulle wrote a screenplay called Planet of the Men, in which Taylor led an uprising of humans against the apes.) Equally challenging was Charlton Heston’s disinterest in doing a sequel and the story limitations he required for his participation (prefiguring, in a way, Harrison Ford’s love/hate relationship with reprising his role as Han Solo on three separate occasions). One senses, then, the herculean task of extending the Ape Saga, and the forces who bring us Beneath do not appear to have risen to the undertaking.

 

Beneath the Planet of the Apes was, after the Star Wars films, among the first sequels I ever saw, and it taught me a valuable lesson – sequels are almost never as good as the original. (More shared territory, it seems, from Monster March.) I said last week that there was nothing about Planet of the Apes that demanded a sequel, especially given the film’s game-changer ending that makes the final statement on the planet. Planet of the Apes was a totality, tied in a bow by its Rod Serling ending; it had much in common with an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, and I can think of very few Twilight Zone episodes that would have been much improved by a sequel.

 

Still, there was room to grow. There was the looming question of what would happen to Zira and Cornelius once Dr. Zaius returned to Ape City, though disappointingly the film never quite explores that. Instead, it’s monkey business as usual, and there’s no mention of the trio’s experience in the Forbidden Zone (which is, perhaps, how Dr. Zaius would want things, anyway). Unfortunately for Beneath, Zira and Cornelius are shunted to the side rather quickly. With McDowall away directing his own film, the brief recasting of Cornelius is distracting, especially given the inclusion of recap footage featuring McDowall, and David Watson, though competent, lacks the vocal color McDowall brought to Cornelius. However, we welcome seeing Zira, who becomes a kind of franchise den mother, but she’s given nothing much to do besides perform cursory assistance to newcomer Brent.

 

When it comes to the subject of Brent, he is lamentably little more than a bargain basement version of Taylor – a fair-haired bearded human who comes from the stars and is mystified by the planet he’s discovered. After losing his crew, he meets up with Nova, journeys to Ape City, befriends our chimpanzee scientists, and makes his way into the Forbidden Zone, where he learns the dark secret of the planet of the apes. It reads familiar because it is familiar: it is exactly the journey Taylor undergoes in Planet of the Apes, but James Franciscus lacks the screen presence of Charlton Heston, to say nothing of how unengaging it is to see a new protagonist tread the same boards one more time.

 

Beneath the Planet of the Apes is not exactly a remake, though, for it adds something substantially new to the franchise. I’m not speaking merely of the gorilla General Ursus, who is an intriguing foil for Dr. Zaius and for the humans (“The only good human,” he growls, “is a dead human!”). Ursus is good hammy fun, and I do wish we’d seen more of him in the franchise beyond this one film. But I’m speaking particularly of the answer to the question posited by the film’s title – what really is beneath the planet of the apes? The answer is a gang of mutated humans with psychic powers, grotesque scarring, and a church of death which worships the last atomic bomb in existence. I have never liked these characters, and I still feel they’re out of place in this franchise. For one, the morality fable is even more on the nose with their inclusion; yes, we know atomic weaponry is no good, very bad, don’t do. This allegorical unsubtlety, coupled with the low-budget sci-fi makeup and set decorations, would seem to belong more properly to something like the original Star Trek series. Moreover, every moment we spend with the mutants is a moment we don’t get to spend with the apes, and that’s a criminal offense in my book. 

 

Planet of the Apes is ultimately a franchise that zags when you think it will zig – not because the story merits a zag but often because the zag is more cost-effective and will extend the life of the franchise into a strange new direction. I promised not to spoil the ending of the first Planet, and I certainly won’t give away the ending to Beneath, which almost feels like a sporting challenge to the writers of any possible third film. “Let’s see you get out of this one!” scripter Paul Dehn seems to say. It’s an anti-cliffhanger from which there seems to be no escape, and yet a scant year later, we would see exactly that – an Escape from the Planet of the Apes, scavenged from the literal detritus of the preceding two films.

 

Beneath the Planet of the Apes is rated G. Directed by Ted Post. Written by Paul Dehn and Mort Abrahams. Starring James Franciscus, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, Linda Harrison, James Gregory, David Watson, and Charlton Heston.

April of the Apes: Planet of the Apes (1968)

I can’t believe it took me five years and a Blu-Ray box set to remember that Planet of the Apes is one of my all-time favorite movies. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been spending more time of late with my Cinema King crown atop my regal head, but when I assembled The Personal Canon in 2016, I left Apes off the list. A year later, I reviewed War for the Planet of the Apes, the third/final in the Andy Serkis trilogy, but still the original Apes skipped my mind. Well, no more – one of the reasons we’re doing “April of the Apes” is to remind me how much I love Planet of the Apes.

George Taylor (Charlton Heston) leads a deep-space exploration that loses its way during two thousand years of cryosleep, stranding Taylor and his comrades (Robert Gunner, Jeff Burton) on a distant world with no way to communicate with their home. To their horror, the astronauts discover that they have landed on a planet where evolution seems to have run in reverse – humans are little better than mute domesticated animals, while apes have mastered civilization. Betrothed chimpanzee scientists Zira and Cornelius (Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall) are fascinated by Taylor, but the orangutan Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) fears that the astronaut’s arrival will be the undoing of ape society.

 

For a movie that is more than 50 years old (I know, right?), Planet of the Apes has a surprisingly modern pace that keeps the movie clipping along briskly. At just shy of two hours, it’s also delightfully well-balanced, with the first ape appearing 30 minutes in; at sixty minutes, the plot turns when the apes discover that Taylor can talk. The final quarter of the film takes an even stranger turn as ape allies with human to investigate the Forbidden Zone – it’s a very methodical and deliberate construction, deploying the underrated four-act structure to craft a narrative that hums like an engine.

 

Though his script was largely rewritten, one senses the steady hand of Rod Serling in the tight plotting, punchy rhythm, and (naturally) the shocking final frames of the film. That ending, which has probably saturated into cultural osmosis by this point, is the sort of tragic allegory that made Serling’s Twilight Zone a television masterpiece. Little of Serling’s dialogue persisted into the finished film, though the bits that remain smack of his brand of cautionary cynicism – as when Taylor opines to his fellow space voyagers, “I’m a seeker, too. But my dreams aren’t like yours. I can’t help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man. Has to be.” Indeed, one almost expects, as the film zooms out from its final tableau, to see Rod Serling standing just out of sight, fingers perched around a smoldering cigarette as he delivers an equally incendiary soliloquy about what man (to borrow a phrase from Serling’s best teleplay, “Time Enough at Last”) has deeded to himself.

 

No one does outrage on the edge of madness like Charlton Heston, and so he’s a perfect audience surrogate for a film that turns the world topsy-turvy as Planet of the Apes does. I’d forgotten how fallible, how cynical Taylor is in this film, even before he falls headlong into the monkey madhouse, but Taylor is that late 60s archetype of the disillusioned older generation, suspicious of the future but guardedly optimistic about his own ability to thrive. His colonial impulses and self-aggrandizement are slowly stripped away throughout the film, and he becomes the hero not because of any traits he possesses – but because he’s the best we have, and he refuses to acquiesce, the reluctant hero whose hesitation is only overridden by his own self-preservation. He comes not as a savior but as a seeker of truth, which is perhaps the higher calling. (Twelve years earlier, Heston had played Moses in the Easter classic The Ten Commandments, though Taylor is a far cry from the divine inspiration of a leader of men.)

 

Of course, no Planet would be complete without its apes, and even though the make-up lacks the technical precision of the 2001 remake or the photorealism of the Serkis trilogy’s CGI effects, there is something very charming about the ape prosthetics as designed by John Chambers. Having just spent a month going through the Universal Classic Monsters franchise and all those lurid make-up effects, jumping into Planet of the Apes almost feels natural. Chambers creates an illusion that never looks phony – hokey, perhaps, compared to its successors, but the film proceeds with such level-headed sincerity that there’s scarcely a chance to question the simian verisimilitude.

Inside of the film’s larger allegory, there’s a sub-allegory about ape society, with the gorillas serving as the ape army, chimpanzees as their workers and scientists, and orangutans as the theocratic governing body. The slippery blur between religion, science, and government feels like another Twilight Zone parable, and nowhere is that tension more acutely rendered than in the character of Dr. Zaius, played brilliantly by Maurice Evans. One of the all-time great screen villains, Dr. Zaius is the venal and desperate orangutan deputy who knows better than any other ape how precariously their society sits atop a mountain of lies, and so his increasing anxiety motivates his every action as he strives to keep Taylor from dismantling his house of cards – not just out of some philosophical drive for truth but also, one senses, out of the escalating spite that exists between the two enemies. Dr. Zaius is so beautifully characterized, his motivations so deftly clear, that he makes a fitting rival for both Taylor and for the very idea of the good; his final scene and his fateful decision therein remind us that there is nothing more dangerous than an authoritarian afraid of losing his power. Put another way, when one man – or ape – controls multiple institutions, those selfsame institutions lose their epistemological power.

 

Let’s not forget Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter as Cornelius and Zira, on whom the unlikely franchise would eventually be built. McDowall especially does a fine job emoting behind his heavy prosthetics, his snout twitching whenever he’s irritated – which is, to be fair, quite often in this film. McDowall would go on to appear in four of the five Apes films (Cornelius was briefly recast while McDowall was away directing his own film), but I was struck by how human Kim Hunter manages to be as Zira, arguably the deuteragonist of the film. Though her fiancé has been beaten down by Dr. Zaius and his refusal to endorse true science, Zira remains open-minded in her pursuit of the truth, captive only to her fascination with Taylor, whom she dubs “Bright Eyes” when she realizes there’s something special about this human. That instinctive and irrepressible curiosity – even more than Taylor’s brutish cynicism – is as compelling a portrait of humanity as anything the film offers.

 

The film’s final statement on humanity is, however, something I can’t spoil here. On the off chance that someone in fifty-three years hasn’t seen the ending or one of its myriad riffs in pop culture, I’ll simply say that it fulfills Aristotle’s definition of an ending – it is both surprising and inevitable, and it is to the film’s great strength that it’s not a mere “twist.” It is the natural conclusion to a dynamite story, and the film only becomes more watchable with each viewing. It’s the sort of film that I’d happily rewatch with anyone who hasn’t seen it before. But it’s also not a film that would demand a sequel, let alone four – unless you’re looking at box office receipts. In its initial release, Planet of the Apes grossed nearly $21 million on a $6 million budget; even in 1968, studio heads went bananas for numbers like that.

 

Planet of the Apes is rated G. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. Written by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling. Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle. Starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, James Whitmore, James Daly, and Linda Harrison.