“Apes exist! Sequel required!” 1
That’s allegedly how screenwriter Paul Dehn learned that a third Planet of the Apes film was in the works after receiving the four word telegram from producer Arthur P. Jacobs following the box office success of Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). It presented Dehn with something of a problem. At the climax of Beneath he’d blown up the eponymous planet and there seemed no way back. His solution was elegant, clever and once again took the franchise off in a completely different and unexpected direction with Escape from the Planet of the Apes, directed by Don Taylor.
It opens with what appears to be the return to Earth of the spacecraft that took astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) and his crew through a time warp and into the future where apes rule over humans, discovered adrift in the waters off the California coast. But when the passengers emerge they turn out to be chimpanzees Zira (Kim Hunter), Cornelius (Roddy McDowall returning to the series after his abscence from Beneath) and Dr Milo (Sal Mineo). Eventually revealing themselves to be intelligent and articulate creatures from Earth’s future, the apes (Milo is killed by a gorilla while they are being held in a zoo) are initially feted by a society fascinated by them. But when Zira is plied with “grape juice plus” (wine) by icy Presidential Science Adviser Dr Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden) – a “Hasslein curve” is supposedly the space-time anomaly that catapulted the astronauts into the future in Planet and Beneath – she reveals the fate of the planet and suddenly the apes are perceived as a threat to the continued dominance of the human race. Learning that Zira is pregnant, the chimps flee, Zira gives birth to a son, Milo, in a circus run by the sympathetic Armando (Ricardo Montalban) and end up on an abandoned ship in a Los Angeles dockyard as Hasslein closes in for the kill…
The difference between Escape and Beneath is far more pronounced than the difference between Beneath and Planet. Gone is the futuristic society turned on its head and in comes a more playful feel (at least in the early stages – being a Planet of the Apes film it inevitably gets decidedly grim later) that focuses the satirical attention on contemporary America as the chimps are slowly assimilated into a middle class life they never do come to fully understand. Like Beneath, it’s very much a film of two halves, the first couple of reels feeling dangerously close to family friendly Apes-lite, the satire being buried beneath broad comedy, But as the dark, conniving heart of the American government is exposed the charming light-heartedness makes way for a sinister portrait of paranoia, murder and another of those unforgettable climaxes that the series was becoming known for. It retains the deeply cynical view of humanity of its predecessors.
McDowall is back and is as fantastic as you’d expect, clearly enjoying the lighter tone of the first half of the film. He and Hunter form the film’s emotional core of the film, their child-like naivete contrasting sharply with Braden’s cold, emotionless and utterly ruthless scientist villain, so determined to protect the human race from the threat he believes the two apes pose that he’s happy to gun them down in cold blood. He’s a strange sort of scientific adviser, one armed with a pistol and a James Bond-like tape recorder hidden in a cigarette case. McDowall and Hunter’s customary commitment to their roles (they both spoke of remaining in make-up between takes and feeling alienated from the rest of the cast and crew as a result) once again sell the unlikely premise as they never treat the roles anything less than totally seriously. Had they decided to camp it up for the sake of the lighter mood it would have been disastrous.
Elsewhere Bradford Dilman and Natalie Trundy – who played one of the mutants in Beneath and would return as the chimpanzee Lisa for the final two films – as two animal behaviourists assigned to examine the apes before their reveal their ability to speak make less of an impact though in fairness they’re given less to do. Ricardo Montalban turns up late in the day and barely registers here though he’ll get a lot more to do in the next film in the series, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972).
Though there’s a lot of fun to be had at the antics of the apes in modern society and there are plenty of barely veiled digs at big government, consumerism and the shallowness of modern life, there are sadly more things wrong with Escape from the Planet of the Apes than there are right. There’s far too much sentimentality, running the serious risk of making Zira and Cornelius far too cute and removing some of the mystique that these highly intelligent and advanced creatures had in the first films. The already shaky between-film continuity continues to fall apart – how do Zira and Cornelius know so much about the history of the forthcoming ape revolution given that just two films ago they didn’t even know that there was a human civilisation that predated their own? How did they manage to retrieve Taylor’s space ship from the bottom f the lake, get it powered up (using what?), get it into space and find the space-time anomaly that would return them back to 20th century earth? Planet and Beneath demanded a high degree of suspension of disbelief and we were happy to play along. In Escape, the unanswered questions become more annoying.
The ending is another belter though. When an enraged Cornelius accidentally kills an orderly after he calls them monkeys, something of a racial slur for the apes, they play right into the hands of the paranoid Hasslein and their fates are sealed. Their murder on the abandoned freighter is as emotional as anything in the series though Dehn’s cop-out clause for a potential sequel (baby Milo is safe in Armando’s circus having swapped places with an ordinary baby chimp) leads to a ludicrous final shot of the infant chimp intoning “mama” over looped footage of a real simian newborn.
It’s a mixed bag then. By no means a terrible film, it is perhaps a disappointing one. Dehn’s time travel plot gives the series a new lease of life and is a clever way to dodge around the not insignificant problem of having blown up the world in the last film. The reveal of the apes would have come as a nice early shock for audiences in those pre-internet, relatively spoiler-free days and the performances of the two leads are always a joy to watch. But the sentimentality lets its down and the biting satire of Planet and Beneath is sorely missed.
- It’s also been reported that the wording was “Apes live! Sequel required!” ↩
The EOFFTV Review 