Planet of the Apes is part of our pop culture now, what with quotes from the main character Taylor (Charlton Heston) such as, “You maniacs! You blew it up!” and “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn, dirty ape!” But there’s much more to Planet of the Apes than that. The movie, as well as the book on which it is based, has more to do with the 1960s than their being produced during that time period.
The book by Pierre Boulle, originally titled The Monkey Planet, was originally written to be just an apocalyptic sci-fi adventure story in the vein of Gulliver’s Travels or Robinson Crusoe that, like most sci-fi novels, has an undercurrent of social commentary, such as how man and animal relate to each other, how evolution takes its course, and the possibility of time travel and what effects it could have on human life. However, once the film comes into being, the story takes the power of what sci-fi can do—project the human condition in a palatable form—to a much grander scale.
The actors in this film were all heavy-hitters in the 1960s. Charlton Heston was one of the ‘60s biggest stars, starring in epics such as The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), Major Dundee (1965) and Khartoum (1966). Heston’s persona in Planet of the Apes can be seen as a bridge between the old-school style of leading man and the leading man of the ‘60s; Heston is as charismatic, chiseled-featured, and in control as many of the Cary Grants and Humphrey Bogarts of the 1940s and ‘50s, but has the questioning intellect, vulnerability, and occasional moments of misanthropy like the Marlon Brandos of the ‘60s. Planet of the Apes is a great example of this bridge, where we see Taylor go from being the bravado-laden leader of the astronaut refugees to becoming a simple and confused player in a much bigger world where humans have no power. To see him without the control he had in the past, where he hated society, shows how, like Marlon Brando in the ‘50s film The Wild Ones and the James Dean movies of the ‘60s, that he is a “rebel without a cause”, a person who hates the establishment he’s used to, but doesn’t know what type of establishment he’s looking for.
Cornelius, one of the chimpanzee scientists, is played by Roddy McDowall, another prominent ‘60s actor. While he also played in epics such as The Greatest Story Ever Told and Cleopatra (1963), he was also in quite a few oddball films such as Lord Love a Duck (1966) , It! (1966), and Inside Daisy Clover (1965). His resume of playing character actors is probably what attracted the casting agents to McDowall when they were looking for the right person to play Cornelius.
Other parts about the movie that cement it in the ‘60s include the makeup and script. The makeup for the apes was made by head makeup designer John Chambers. Chambers’s work can be seen throughout a lot of shows in the ‘60s, including Star Trek, I Spy, Lost in Space, Mission Impossible, and the ’50s show The Munsters (Behind the Planet of the Apes). The script was co-written by Rod Serling, writer of The Twilight Zone, a show that lasted through the first four years of the ‘60s. The music, composed by Jerry Goldsmith, is an experimental score much different than most other films in the ‘60s. This is probably partly due to his background of working primarily in sci-fi entertainment, such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968), Dr. Kildare (1961-1966), The Twilight Zone, and later on, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Alien (1979).
Other elements of the ‘60s go much further than just the actors’ filmographies and physical parts of filming. The choice of characters reflects the changing climate of the time.
For instance, two of the astronauts with Taylor is a woman, Stewart (Dianne Stanley), and Dodge, a black man (Jeff Burton). Just ten years before, women wouldn’t have even been shown in such a career as astronaut. A black man wouldn’t have been traditionally seen, either. But in this movie, we see both.
Also, the idea of interracial coupling is subtly introduced. The voyage the astronauts were going on is a pioneering one, one where they would possibly have to populate the planet. By having Dodge as one of the male astronauts, it is assumed that during the time period these astronauts came from (the film makes mention of the astronauts coming from “the future” of 1972), the social climate had changed enough to where people weren’t in arms if and when an ethnic person was seen romantically with a white person.
The tribunal scene is one of the most indicative ‘60s scenes in the film. While in the documentary Behind the Planet of the Apes, it is said that the tribunal scene is a riff off the McCarthy hearings, part of the beginning of the paranoia surrounding the Cold War that lasted through the ‘60s all the way to the ‘80s. The orangutans over the tribunal are set to expose Taylor as a hoax and Cornelius and his fellow scientist and fiancée Zira (Kim Hunter) as heretics, much in the same vein as people were out to find and place blame on communists, which came to mean anyone that thought or acted differently. During this time, the communist threat was a silent and invisible one, which is evident in the conversation Taylor has with Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), the main orangutan out to destroy him:
TAYLOR: “So what if I am a mutant? How is one mutant enough to send you into a panic?”
DR. ZAIUS: “Because you are not unique!…I admit that where there’s one mutant, there’s another and another and another, a whole nest of them!”
Dr. Zaius’s fear of Taylor doesn’t solely come from the fact that Taylor can talk. It comes from the fact that he looks like any other man on the planet, and that means that any man has the ability to talk and think. This fear of anonymity can also be seen in the ‘60s film The Battle of Algiers, where the French are waging war against a faceless Algerian army who negotiate plans through secrecy. In fact, the co-writer of the Planet of the Apes script, Michael Wilson, was blacklisted during the McCarthy trials.
The tribunal scene and the fear surrounding it also reflects the turbulent times the film was produced in. During the ‘60s, there was political and civil unrest, such as the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and President Kennedy, and the free love/hippie movement (Behind the Planet of the Apes). Much of the fear during the ‘60s hinged on change, and that same fear of change can be seen in that scene. Also, there are many scenes in the movies where the prejudice and discrimination between apes, as well as the discrimination apes have toward humans, is discussed, which can reflect how the uneasy times of the ‘60s brought discrimination and prejudicial feelings to its raw height.
Also, the horrific ending, preceded by Dr. Zaius’s speech to Taylor (“The Forbidden Zone was once a paradise; your kind made a wasteland of it.”) also gives rise to the thought that man, for whatever reason, killed themselves using nuclear weapons. This apocalyptic future underscores what many people feared would happen; that the U.S. and Russia, along with Cuba and North Korea, would blow the world to pieces using nuclear weapons. (In fact, the threat of nuclear weaponry exists throughout the whole Planet of the Apes movie series, which is at its most extreme in Beneath the Planet of the Apes.) Even though Taylor does gain some control in the ending scenes, the final scene brings the character back to his “rebel without a cause” roots, where he damns his own kind for destroying the world that he had hoped would change for the better. In a way, Taylor’s misanthropic viewpoint was proven to be the correct one.
While this film can be seen on the surface as a thrilling sci-fi adventure, there is more to why Planet of the Apes has endured as one of the most entertaining and iconic sci-fi films in American cinema. By steeping the culture of the ‘60s into an apocalyptic story, Planet of the Apes reflects the changing climate of the past while giving us sly commentary on what we can do to save our future.
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Works Cited
Kevin Burns and David Comtois, dirs. Behind the Planet of the Apes. Perf. Roddy
McDowall, Kim Hunter, Charton Heston. 20th Century Fox, 1998.
Franklin J. Schaffner, dir. The Planet of the Apes. Perf. Charlton Heston, Roddy
McDowall, Kim Hunter Maurice Evans, Linda Harrington. 20th Century Fox, 1968.
n.p. “The Planet of the Apes”. IMDB. Web. IMDB.com, Inc. 2010. 22 October 2010.
