Soylent Green

(1973) ***

This marks the end of my quick Horrorthon sidetrip through Charlton Heston’s dystopian 70s flicks. It’s actually a pretty fun movie to watch in conjunction with Omega Man, and it must have been a trip to film the two. In Omega Man, Heston’s alone, the last man alive in a world ravaged by the plague. In Soylent Green, he’s a corrupt cop in 2022 NYC, an overpopulated environmental disaster of a city, with all indoor spaces covered by sleeping bodies.

This, I think, is the slightly better of the 2 movies—the pacing and tension are sharper, and there’s a great supporting performance by Edward G. Robinson, who died just before the film’s release. The plot involves a big corporate food producer and a mystery about where they’re getting the ingredients for their new popular miracle foodstuff, “soylent green.” Hint: it rhymes with shmanibbalism.

Some of my favorite bits:

For some reason, it’s an incredibly misogynistic future. Women have been reduced, literally, to “furniture.” A furnished apartment means ones that comes with a live-in prostitute. There’s a great subtlety to how this is revealed to the viewer, too. Heston shows up at an apartment and quizzes a girl, “Furniture?” “Yes.” “Personal or building?” “Building.” It takes a bit to realize he’s asking who SHE is.

The world sucks so bad that euthanasia is big business. There’s an elaborate Epcot pavilion type place where you can go and commit assisted suicide while classical music plays and you watch a huge fucking Imax screen with images of earth as it was. It’s really a pretty moving and cool scene when Edward G. Robinson goes out this way.

Each detective has his own “book,” who acts as sort of his personal researcher. It seems actual books are rare, so certain old folks have collected weird random libraries in their tiny apartments. It’s a interesting choice—clealry by the mid-70s, they would have known computers were the future of data storage, but in this dystopia, everything is so fucked up and broken down that computers are way beyond the means of lowly police departments.

The foodstuff produced by the Soylent corporation (soylent red, soylent green) is supposedly shit they’re combing from the ocean, like plankton or something. It looks like smooth rounded squares of plastic..seriously, you expect Bond to playing poker with soylent green chips in Monaco. And the people go nuts for it. Food riots and the like.

The folks piled on all indoor surfaces is pretty good cinematic imagery. But for some reason, they all love stairs. Over and over, Heston has to pick his way up and down stair cases crowded with sleeping bodies. Actually, picking ones way through floors strewn with bodies is maybe the most recurring image in the film.

This is actually based on a novel by Harry Harrison, an author that Octo and I used to read in high school. He’s kind of a big deal in sci-fi fiction circles, and his Stainless Steel rat series kicks ass. Just a fun side note.

Joseph Cotton has a small role, so you get to see two true titans of the golden age of Hollywood noir era (Robinson and Cotten) in some of their final roles. Robinson in particular is really really good—I like it when the legends show up in newer movies and immediately command the screen. This is how we did it when I was working with Fritz Lang, bitches.

The rundown, book stuffed apartment Heston shares with
Robinson made me think of these guys.