!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY PLOT TWISTS!!

Today, Richard Fleischer‘s Soylent Green seems more like a work of prophecy than it ever has and although it opened to mixed reviews, its reputation has improved over the years as the issues it concerns itself with look increasingly less like science fiction and more like real global emergencies that are largely been mishandled or even just ignored. It belongs to that strand of intelligent, ideas-driven science fiction being produced in the States prior to the release of Star Wars (1977) which changed everything, not necessarily for the better. The film based on the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison who remained one of the film’s most vocal critics right up until his death in 2012 – “They decided to somehow reduce the work down to a cannibalism tale,” he once complained to interviewer Jeff Goldsmith.

Over-population was a big deal in science fiction and beyond in the late 1960s and early 70s – novels like John Brunner’s award-winning Stand on Zanzibar (1968), William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s Logan’s Run (1967) and its subsequent 1976 film adaptation, and Brian W. Aldiss’ Earthworks (1965), and films like Z.P.G. (1972) all touched on the subject. Soylent Green paints a particularly grim picture of a New York city drowning under a population of 40 million (for context in 2019, the city was populated by 8.419 million), where food riots are commonplace and starvation an everyday threat. It’s 2022 – food is in shorts supply, pollution is out of control leading to “the greenhouse effect” and the divide between rich and poor has never been wider.

New York detective Frank Thorn (Charlton Heston, making his third appearance in sombre science fiction satires, after Planet of the Apes (1968) and The Omega Man (1971)) and his ageing friend Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), a former analyst, or “Book”, share a rundown apartment and are among the lucky ones – the get home after a days work, Thorn has to clamber over whole families piled high in the stairwells looking for a place to sleep. Thorn’s latest assignment is to investigate the killing of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten), a board member of the powerful Soylent Corporation whose food products, Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow and the new Soylent Green are often all the starving and destitute have to live on. During his investigation, Thorn meets Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), Simonson’s “furniture”, a concubine provided by the Corporation who remains in the man’s home to be passed on to the next resident, gets caught up in a food riot which the authorities try to control by lifting rioters off the street in “Scoops”, large bulldozers and begins to uncover a conspiracy. Roth takes copies of the Soylent Corporation Oceanographic Reports to a team of Books at the Supreme Exchange and is horrified to learn that the seas are dying and can no longer provide the plankton required to manufacture Soylent Green. So what is it made of?

Famously, the film ends with an injured but still raging Thorn being carried off on a stretcher, bloodied hand raised high and shouting “Soylent Green is people! We’ve gotta stop them somehow!” Soylent – presumably with the full knowledge and blessing of the American government – has found what appears to be an elegant if monstrous solution to two of the world’s biggest problems – human flesh is in plentiful supply, food isn’t. As the film closes, Soylent are only using the bodies of the recently deceased in the manufacture of Soylent Green but as the situation worsens, as it surely must, one can’t but fear that murder and enforced euthanasia are only a step away.

Though Harrison wrote in the book Omni’s Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies that he was only “fifty percent” satisfied with the way the film turned out, beneath its standard issue police procedural plot, there’s plenty of fascinating background texture to be found, much of it lifted wholesale from the book. It was one of the first films to mention “the greenhouse effect” and to feature that standby of a certain strand of pulp science fiction, the euthanasia centre. Though it was newly minted for the film, the scene in which Roth, appalled after learning the truth about Soylent Green and having spent much of the film ruing the passing of the pre-crisis world he remembers, decides to end it all in a controlled environment, watching gorgeous images of a now lost natural world and listening to classical music, was made all the more affecting by the real-life passing from bladder cancer of Robinson just twelve days after filming ended. The producers briefly considered removing the scene but saw sense, realising perhaps that it’s the emotional core of the film. Robinson‘s performance – he knew that this would be his 101st and final film, that the end was very near – is heart-breaking and, one suspects, the raw emotion didn’t require much of his considerable acting talent.

There are faults of course. The idea of women as mere “furniture” to be used and passed on from one man to another is a provocative one but it’s not terribly well explored, and Taylor-Young‘s performance is too bland to make much of the situation. There’s the perennial problem with this sort of thing of trying to get your head around how a conspiracy of this size and complexity could be maintained with so many people – and consequently so many possible leaks – involved. And although it’s the bit everyone who has seen the film remembers, the melodramatic ending tends to overshadow the rest of the film. One can understand why screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg (the object of most of Harrison‘s ire over the years) felt the need to do something big and flashy – in the novel, the murder investigation simply runs of steam and the solved almost by accident.

But it’s not enough to undo the film’s many good points, it’s fascinating background details, its world-building and its chilly parallels with the real early 21st century. It has that eerie atmosphere that 70s science fiction filmmakers seemed particularly adept at capturing, a creepy sense that all of this was just a few minutes into our futures and that, if anything, the truth would be even worse. As of the real 2022, we haven’t quite descended into the hell depicted in Soylent Green, but one can’t help feeling that, as the climate crisis worsens, a pandemic continues to grip the world and the human population continues to explode, that it might be just over the horizon. It’s not a cheery thought, but that’s the power of the film – no punches are pulled, and Soylent Green dares you to look into the abyss and try not to panic.

Crew
Directed by: Richard Fleischer; © MCMLXXIII [1973] Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.; A Walter Seltzer–Russell Thacher production. Presented by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Produced by: Walter Seltzer, Russell Thacher; Screenplay by: Stanley R. Greenberg; Based Upon a Novel [Make Room! Make Room!] by: Harry Harrison; Director of Photography: Richard H. Kline; Film Editor: Samuel E. Beetley; Original Music: Fred Myrow; Costume Design: Pat Barto; Make-Up: Bud Westmore; Hair Styles: Sherry Wilson; Special Photographic Effects: Robert R. Hoag, Matthew Yuricich; Special Photographic Sequences by: Braverman Productions, Inc.; Special Visual Effects: A.J. Lohman; Art Director: Edward C. Carfagno; Casting: Jack Baur

Cast
Charlton Heston (Thorn); Leigh Taylor-Young (Shirl); Chuck Connors (Tab); Joseph Cotten (Simonson); Brock Peters (Hatcher); Paula Kelly (Martha); Edward G. Robinson (Sol Roth); Stephen Young (Gilbert); Mike Henry (Kulozik); Lincoln Kilpatrick (the priest); Roy Jenson (Donovan); Leonard Stone (Charles); Whit Bissell (Governor Santini); Celia Lovsky (the exchange leader); Dick Van Patten (usher #1); Morgan Farley (book #1); John Barclay (book #2); Belle Mitchell (book #3); Cyril Delevanti (book #4); Forrest Wood, Faith Quabius (attendants)