Title: Soylent Green

Year: 1973

Director: Richard Fleischer

Reviewed By: Garrett Chaffin-Quiray

It�s 2022 and the greenhouse effect has destroyed Earth�s ecosystem. New York City overflows with 40,000,000 inhabitants who live in idleness with 50 percent unemployment. Daily temperatures hover at 90 degrees and utilities and natural foods are strictly rationed. People live in the closest quarters imaginable while rabidly waiting for government handouts distributed through the controls of a standing riot squad. Inflation is rampant and human life is reduced to being a traded commodity with burials eschewed in favor of mass mulching. State sponsored suicide is performed at resort clinics, migration is outlawed, farms and cities are guarded by armed soldiers and the dominant corporation is Soylent, a synthetic foodstuffs producer.

Into this apocalyptic circumstance is inserted Police Detective Thorn played by the flabby post-Planet of the Apes Charlton Heston. He is assigned to investigate the murder of the super wealthy aristocrat William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten) who was apparently bludgeoned to death in his apartment by an armed intruder.

On scene Thorn meets Simonson�s sketchy bodyguard, Tab (Chuck Connors), and his "furniture", Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), who is a pretty young woman employed as an all-in-one maid, concubine and companion for wealthy men. Smelling something fishy about Simonson�s death, Thorn avoids the censure of his commander, Lt. Hatcher (Brock Peters), and assigns his aged research assistant, Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), to look into the deceased�s personal history.

Once discovering Simonson�s place on the Soylent Corporation�s board of directors Thorn finds himself in a conspiracy of horrific proportion. Simultaneously drawn to Shirl and tailed by Tab, he bumps into various local politicos before discovering the ingredients of the Soylent Corporation�s dominant food supplement, Soylent Green.

Ending with the campy, shocking and somehow predictive line, "Soylent Green is people", Thorn�s adventure is an odd but appealing adaptation of Harry Harrison�s science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!. With a Manhattan cityscape at once realistically congested in its indoor settings and almost ludicrously vacant in its outdoor sequences, the movie�s worldview doesn�t move all that far away from its production circumstances in 1973 though it does make powerful suggestions about the direction of human civilization.

Merely jazzing up the look of interior design elements, practical fashion and the presence of dump trucks doesn�t, by itself, produce an alternate future. Instead of 2022 being the logical extension of 1973�s then- current technologies and cultural interests, Soylent Green looks more like a group of big ideas translated into film through the prism of a dance club promoter working without a budget and too many deadlines.

Heston walks through his scenes with the same swagger and affectation of acting ability evidenced in virtually all his work since The Greatest Show on Earth. Yet it�s this central performance that gives the film its mix of campy silliness and bravura social commentary.

Dressed as he is like a cruising Queen in Greenwich Village his physical presence is a reminder of how the male movie lead was on the verge of becoming lean and muscle bound with the emergence of Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the following decade. That he�s hairy, soft around the middle and costumed like a pinup model makes his middle age hero reek of one of the film�s themes about masculinity in crisis. Envisioned as alluring to Shirl who�s half his age, Thorn is all appetite and instinct without benefit of reason.

The movie�s strength is the way director Richard Fleischer, who�s last name is German for "butcher", imbues it with a second theme about how people can be systematically reduced to animal consumption. Masses of crowds are carefully arranged to contrast the humdrum affairs of everyday people with the hero narrative of Thorn�s investigation and this contrast, along with the film�s premise, recuperate its dated qualities of performance and production design.

Perhaps it�s the intelligence of screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg who adapted Harrison�s book and gleaned from it what was important while customizing the project as a Heston vehicle. Perhaps it was the film�s equation of people as livestock and the future as a condition of state-enforced wealth protection and helplessness. Perhaps it was how the movie used urban details like population congestion, garbage removal and welfare lines to create a bureaucratic urban purgatory. Regardless, Soylent Green influenced its audiences in 1973 and remains a thoroughly enjoyable movie today.

Significantly it was also Edward G. Robinson�s last film. Playing a curmudgeon with memories of the world before a collapsed biosphere and Soylent-led corporate socialism, his Sol Roth is the movie�s moral and emotional center. Acting alongside Heston his performance contrasts sharply with the lead actor�s nearly flat characterization and makes Robinson�s 50-year contribution to movies and film acting stand on end like the luminous achievement it really is.

In a scene where he and Heston share a meal of natural foods, Sol prepares the vegetables, brandy and beef to introduce gastronomical pleasures to Thorn in an age of Soylent�s food chips. Ad-libbed between the actors at Fleischer�s request, the scene�s joy in taking a meal demonstrates the power of small gestures and illuminates our weirdly fetishistic requirement of using forks, spoons and knives when we eat.

Like any movie positing a potential future, though, Soylent Green is impressive to the extent its guesses about what will come to pass still seem plausible to us when reviewing its prognostication many years later. Its failure is in how its guesses look quaint or even laughable in having been surpassed since 1973.

For instance, Simonson buys Shirl a video game that closely resembles what aficionados will recognize as Asteroids from the later 1970s. Shirl�s game called "Computer Space" was actually one of the first coin- operated video games ever produced by Nutting Associates in 1971. Designed by Nolan Bushnell, more famous for having founded Atari and being the designer of "Pong", the game is largely an upright console that was surpassed in look, feel and physical presence by the mid-�80s.

Then there are the jarringly retrograde gender roles where women are literal playthings for wealthy masters of the universe. Echoing either a regressive belief in the filmmakers about the encroachment of feminism and women into public life the use of attractive young women as furniture is troubling even while being titillating in the Penthouse Forum-imagination way of adolescent fantasy.

Plus there are interesting guesses about future technologies like the placement of wireless phones in keyed metal boxes on city blocks or the necessity of riot squads as part of the police force. That the movie�s wireless phones look more like apartment building buzzer systems than our current handheld mobile phones and that the riot squad looks like a group of American football players practicing without pads means there are some shortsighted ideas in the film. Still, an ounce of inspiration and a creepy premise about remaindered human populations ground into synthetic foodstuffs is definitely worth the time spent committing it to celluloid.

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