From Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Z

How many people have read Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes recently? Sure, sure, it gets regular reprints, but you don’t see people enthusing about it that much; whilst most books adapted into movies have healthy contingents of fans who insist that the film just isn’t the same as the original novel, I suspect that these days almost everyone who glances at the original novel has experienced and enjoyed one of the movie adaptations first, most likely the original. Boulle’s 1963 novel was a modest success, sure, but the 1968 movie was a critical and commercial mega-hit, a pop cultural landmark, and has the most famous twist ending since “Rosebud was his sled”.

It also was the start of a five-film series, with one sequel a year popping out like clockwork from 1970 to 1973. An argument can definitely be made for the Planet of the Apes saga being the biggest Hollywood science fiction franchise before Star Wars came along; certainly, other than 2001: A Space Odyssey, big-budget SF which took itself semi-seriously was a scarcity in Hollywood at this time, the genre largely being left to cheap and cheerful B-movies. But did the original movie merit this treatment – and if so, did it get the sequels it’s deserve? Let’s review.

Planet of the Apes

The original movie really requires no introduction, not least because the Twilight Zone-quality twist ending (provided by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, who co-wrote the script): Charlton Heston plays George Taylor, who thinks his wayward space mission has left him on a planet where apes evolved from men, only to find it was Earth all along when he encounters the wreckage of the Statue of Liberty. This, however, overlooks a lot about the movie, some of which has aged poorly and some of which remains interesting.

Dirty In the 1970s, Outdated By the 80s

Police-themed action movies issued forth like a flood in the 1980s, and it’s hard to find any of them that don’t owe at least a little something to Dirty Harry. Essentially an attempt to transfer Clint Eastwood’s steely persona honed via his work in Westerns into a modern-day San Francisco context, at their best the movies were controversial for all the right reasons – raising questions about police brutality and the rule of law which, despite knee-jerk reactions in some quarters, the movies were handling with more nuance and less simplistically than they were given credit for. At worst, they replicated the worst excesses of their imitators. How did they lose their way? Let’s see if we can find out.

Dirty Harry

Give the original Dirty Harry this much: it’s not at all coy about where it’s coming from, displaying its colours on its sleeve when at the beginning it shows a memorial to San Francisco police department officers killed in the line of duty, effectively dedicating the film to them.

From that opening shot we fade in to our antagonist – Scorpio (Andy Robinson), a character inspired by the Zodiac Killer’s apparently random murders and his taunting of police. Scorpio uses a silenced sniper rifle to observe a random woman in a rooftop pool; after leching over her through the scope, he shoots her dead for the sheer fun of it. Cut to “Dirty” Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) arriving on the crims scene, sussing out where the sniper’s nest must have been, and getting down to some hard-edged police work with a funk soundtrack…