1973 science fiction, dir. Richard Fleischer, Charlton Heston, Edward
G. Robinson: IMDb /
allmovie. A routine murder
investigation will lead to a terrible secret. (Spoilers for a
fifty-year-old film.)
It's difficult for me to make the adjustment: in the early 1970s,
Charlton Heston wasn't the joke he's been since I first became aware
of him, he was an actual bankable leading man, probably most famously
in The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959). In the 1960s he
was one of the few working actors to stand up and support the Civil
Rights movement. And his later actions… hadn't happened yet when he
made this film.
He still comes over here as a bit of a thug, though the script makes
it clearly deliberate. Even though we're meant to believe in him as a
good cop, one of the very few who is prepared to press on with looking
fpr the murderer when the political influence gets deployed to hush up
the whole affair, his character still casually steals luxury goods
from the crime scene. And while he clearly believes he's seducing the
concubine of the murdered man (no civil rights, an amenity that goes
with the apartment until a tenant gets bored with her) the power
differential is so vast that I can't help seeing it as a rape of
someone who isn't allowed not to pretend to enjoy it.
Mostly though this is here to show the degenerate state of the world,
with food rioters scooped up (literally) in the streets and never seen
again. But hey, the new plankton-based synthetic food will solve
everything! (Now, of course, we know that junk food can be loaded with
all the addictive flavour chemicals and people will happily eat it
instead of the real thing.)
But things carry on, and there's a lot of blundering around, and
finally Edward G. Robinson's last scene ever filmed is his own
character's death. It does seem strangely ad-hoc; though, as the whole
film does; why bring in two attendants to wheel the gurney over to the
tracks for the processing chute when you could have put it on the
tracks in the first place. Heston's character bursts in, insisting on
talking to his dying friend before it's too late… and then spends ages
not saying anything while the effects sequence runs.
Lots of spectacle, culminating in a running fight through the Hyperion
Waste Water Treatment Plant. Or… not quite culminating, because our
hero runs to a church and the assassin who's after him follows. And
that sequence in which the assassin is picking his way through a room
of sleeping strangers could have been fiercely atmospheric… if we knew
the guy or cared about his success. Instead, Heston Conquers All, and
runs out into the street shouting like a madman.
But it's basically all melodrama. Nobody has a solution to the
problem, nobody's even trying to solve it. The Soylent Corporation who
are reprocessing bodies into food (presumably for the trace minerals),
and who murdered the guy who grew a conscience, are the only people
trying not to bring it all down in rioting, which is what's clearly
going to happen if anyone actually listens to Our Hero…
If Silent Running had too much message, this has too little:
"overpopulation bad", meh, on to the next thing.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.