Planet of the Apes

AS the intellectual shocker its creators no doubt intended, Planet of the Apes is a joke. But the joke is funny enough often enough to sustain the picture through a series of embarrassing lapses in logic, some third-rate color photography, and sets worthy of the more outlandish oriental monster movies. Viewed with tolerance, and press passes, Planet of the Apes can be appreciated alternately as low comedy, high adventure and, at moments, serious science fiction. In other words, it's a gas.

Despite the warning of its publicity sheet, after detailing the plot till within minutes of the end, that "the shocking conclusion of Planet of the Apes will not be revealed in any synopsis," the following synopsis will find it necessary to reveal the shocking conclusion: Three American astronauts zip through space and crashland on a planet where men are mute animals and apes are civilized. The one survivor (Charlton Heston), makes his own intelligence known to a female sociologist and her fiance (Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowell), who provoke a veritable Scopes trial in reverse, at the end of which Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) resolves to castrate Heston and reduce him otherwise to a vegetable. His ape sponsors, however, rescue him, and together they journey to a cave where McDowall claims to have unearthed evidence of a lost human culture. Evans arrives, dynamites the cave, and mercifully lets Heston go his way, complete with mute mate. But after traveling some miles down the beach, Heston discovers the Statue of Liberty buried waist-high in sand, thus revealing the great secret that the planet of the apes is dear old earth after a nuclear war.

The overriding logical gap in this weighty story is that the apes speak English: not only is it unlikely that our language should be preserved by another civilization millions of years into the future, it is inconceivable that an American space traveler should fail to wonder at this phenomenon on what he supposes to be an alien planet. But Heston expresses no amazement at his ability to communicate with his captors, and while screenwriters Rod Serling and Michael Wilson can rely on the existence of other movies in which interstellar strangers speak the same tongue, the flaw is no less glaring for its ability to elude the audience.

Visually, Planet of the Apes is just as senseless. The ape community looks to have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, on an off-day. A lengthy fight sequence between Heston and the apes achieves next to no continuity because director Franklin Schaffner fools around too much with the camera. But the apes themselves, if a cut below their remarkable prototypes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, could easily be worse--with lousy makeup or lousy actors. Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall and Maurice Evans are the best.