In the early 18th Century, New York City, then a colony of England, was one of the most important
trading posts in all of North America, with slavery being one of its most important
commodities. In 1712, roughly two dozen slaves banded together in rebellion against this inhuman
state of affairs. They gathered weapons, set fire to an orchard, and hid in the shadows. When men
came to tend to the fire, the slaves attacked, killing at least nine slave owners and injuring
several more. While they had hoped to inspire a slave revolt throughout the city, in the end,
the rioting slaves were hunted down and brutally murdered in ways far too unpleasant to relate
here. In response, harsher laws were enacted to control the slave population, leading to more
repression and human misery and starting America down a long and dark road of racial violence.
Two and a half centuries later, despite the United States declaring their independence
by stating unequivocally that all men are created equal and then later outlawing slavery,
the country was still torn apart by segregation and racial inequality,
even in the West, where hundreds of thousands of black Americans migrated after World War II
in hopes of finding safe haven. By the mid-1960's, race riots were becoming all-too common,
and after a questionable traffic stop went horribly wrong, the neighborhood of Watts
in Los Angeles exploded in a four day frenzy of violence that shook the nation to its core.
While Watts was certainly the most impactful, racially-charged riots continued into the early
70's, and such urban unrest became an endemic part of American life during the civil rights era.
This became the backdrop for a science-fiction film, the fourth in a series known for its social
commentary, that aimed to fully explore this phenomenon and recontextualize it in a clear way,
to help put an end to the cycle of violence once and for all.
It has been eighteen years since the so-called "ape-o-nauts" Cornelius and Zira appeared on
the scene, claiming to be from a distant future where humans have become animals and apes have
become the dominant species on Earth. Though it was thought that their infant child had
been killed along with them during their deadly escape, we've just learned that the child lives
on in the form of Caesar, the leader of the band of roving apes now wreaking havoc in our streets.
Stay in your homes, lock your doors, and stay tuned for updates from local authorities,
who are telling this station they hope to have the situation resolved within the hour.
I repeat, lock your doors and remain in your homes. This will all be over soon.
Before we go any further, if you could please hit that like button,
you'll help me fight back against the lousy human bastards keeping my people down.
If you really do like this video, please subscribe as well.
Thank you in advance. With that out of the way, let's get back to the subject at hand.
When producer Arthur P. Jacobs and writer Paul Dehn were working on how best to end 1971's Escape
from the Planet of the Apes, they knew they wanted to leave the door open for a sequel, having been
burned before by the apocalyptic conclusion to the previous film, Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
Thus, they left the baby chimpanzee of Cornelius and Zira alive in the end,
hidden away in a traveling circus.
After Escape's financial and critical success, the studio predictably demanded another sequel,
so Jacobs and Dehn began with the assumption that this baby,
grown up, would be the central character and that the film would complete the narrative circle
introduced by Cornelius and Zira's traveling backwards in time. Dehn was keen to show the
story of apes rebelling against their human masters, the loose outline of which had already
been suggested both by Pierre Boulle's original novel and by Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
"They became alert to the concept of slavery, and as their numbers grew, to slavery's antidote."
Despite being British, Dehn leaned heavily on current American anxieties,
even going so far as to model the climax of the script on the Watts riots.
This immediately caused tension with the studio, which was excited by Dehn and Jacobs' decision to
take the series in a more action-oriented direction but was eager to maintain the
family-friendly audience cultivated by three successive "G"-rated pictures. Despite the
studio's concerns about violence, though, Jacobs moved ahead with Dehn's script and hired as
director J. Lee Thompson, who had been previously considered for the original Planet of the Apes and
who had achieved a good reputation following The Guns of Navarone and Cape Fear. With a miniscule
budget of one point seven million dollars, work began on Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
Roddy McDowell, who portrayed Cornelius in two of the three previous films,
was brought back to play his character's own son, Caesar. McDowell does an amazing job, behaving
similarly enough to Cornelius to be a believable son but also charting a very different course, one
in which his ape character becomes embittered and ultimately radicalized against all of humanity.
Reprising his role as the good-hearted circus owner Armando, whose death is largely responsible
for Caesar's radicalization, is Ricardo Mantal-kahn--I mean, Ricardo Mantalban.
The only other "good" human is Malcolm MacDonald, the sympathetic governor's
aide who helps Caesar and tries to pull him back from the brink of madness in the end.
It was obviously important to cast an actor of color in the role,
and they chose the television veteran Hari Rhodes, probably best known for his role in Roots.
The primary villain, Governor Breck, is played by veteran actor and one-time Academy Award nominee
Don Murray, best known for movies like Bus Stop, Shake Hands with the Devil, and Advise & Consent--
"If we lose this battle, that's the end of the world as we know it.
This will be the end of human civilization, and the world will belong to a planet of apes!"
--while the comedian Severn Darden plays a secondary villain as the Mengele-inspired Kolp. As
for the female lead, the chimpanzee Lisa, Arthur Jacobs' own wife, Natalie Trundy, returned for her
third role in a Planet of the Apes film, following her roles as a mutant in Beneath the Planet of
the Apes and the animal psychologist Stephanie Branton in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
Filming began in late January of 1972, with most of the exterior locations being filmed
at Century City on what used to be part of the Fox backlot and at the University of California,
Irvine, where newly-constructed modernist buildings lended a near-futuristic look.
Despite the low budget, director J. Lee Thompson was able to take advantage of
dark settings and dynamic camera angles to hide many of the constraints, and he relied
on old-school filmmaking techniques to make small crowds seem much larger than they were.
"My God, there's more!"
In a further effort to save on costs, many props,
sets, and costumes were borrowed from several of Fox's television properties,
including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Time Tunnel, and most of the background apes were
given pull-over masks instead of getting the full John Chambers treatment the series was famous for.
The real difficulties came after a first cut was assembled, which test audiences decried as too
bloody, too violent, and much too harrowing for children. The studio, worried about an "R" rating,
demanded cuts to several of the more brutal scenes and a drastic change to the ending.
In the original ending, which you can find on the film's Blu-Ray release,
after Caesar gives his climactic speech denouncing humanity,
the gathered mob beats Governor Breck, presumably to death, and the film cuts to black.
While all three of the previous films were notorious for shocking and downbeat endings, this
ending was simply too upsetting for the studio and test audiences, forcing the filmmakers to
dub in new dialogue from Roddy McDowell in which he tells the crowd to lay down their weapons.
"But now, now we will put away our hatred."
The filmmakers then did some hasty editing to incorporate this into the film,
removing Breck's death.
With a new cut assembled, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes ultimately received a "PG" rating,
making it the only entry in the original series to not earn a "G," and it released in June of 1972,
less than six months after cameras began rolling. It received mixed reviews from
critics, with the only consistent praise going to McDowell's performance and Thompson's directing,
even while the critics called the story out for its heavy-handed themes and general joylessness.
It did well at the box office, though, raking in about two and a half times
its budget in the first week of release. It was especially popular with black audiences,
and in its theatrical run, the film made a total domestic gross of just over nine million dollars,
certifying the film as a hit and ensuring a fifth entry for the franchise.
It's usually hard to divorce any individual sequel from a series when discussing legacy,
but Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is a minor exception, as it was the inspiration for
the wildly successful franchise reboot, 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
"Take your stinking paw off me, you damn dirty ape."
"NO!"
Personally speaking, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes has always been my favorite sequel to
the original Planet of the Apes, particularly for its provocative nature and use of science-fiction
to explore current, real-world problems that could never be addressed more directly.
It was bold to make a movie in 1972 that digs deep into issues of slavery, racial resentment,
violence, and oppression that mirrors something as incendiary as the Watts riots, but the thin
camouflage of science-fiction was just enough to allow the filmmakers to get away with it.
While it presents itself as a sci-fi action/adventure and while the studio behind
it wanted to market it as a decent family film, Conquest is true to the legacy of the series,
in that it isn't interested in making audiences comfortable. Instead, it wants you to really
think about the state of the world around you and what it could mean for the future, and it
has a unique way of recontextualizing a neat cultural narrative into something more nuanced.
"How do you propose to gain this freedom?"
"By the only means left to us: revolution."
Perhaps this is why I dislike the shoe-horned theatrical ending so much, because it pulls the
story's biggest punch. By this point, Caesar has gone all the way over the edge to a point where
there is no coming back, and that's by design. Dehn was trying to show the horror of the cycle of
violence, that once forged, it becomes impossible to break, but this sanitized ending, where Caesar
is allowed to keep some semblance of heroism after what he has done, ignores human nature.
The cuts are problematic, too, because while the studio was only concerned with the rating, the
story's whole point is violence. To cut away from the bloody and gruesome business of revolution
is to make Caesar's actions more acceptable, and while we're supposed to sympathize with
the horrors he and his fellow apes have been subjected to, we're also supposed to see that
responding to violence with violence can be just as savage as the sin of slavery, no matter
the righteousness of the cause. The theme of violence is a constant for the entire series,
and Conquest fully embraces the lesson of the original film.
"Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars,
still make war against his brother?"
While that film had been more
concerned with the consequences of violence on a nuclear scale, this movie shows how social unrest
can be no less self-destructive than the atomic bomb. Sure, the themes are about as subtle as
an atomic bomb and the all-black human costumes and gestapo uniforms are a bit too on-the-nose,
but for the time, it was probably cathartic to see such a nightmarish charicature of current
events play out from the comfort of a theater seat. And hey, it's still relevant today.
Therefore, there's no doubt in my mind that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
is deserving of the title of Sci-Fi Classic.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. What's your favorite Planet of the Apes movie,
not counting the first one? Let me know in the comments, and while you're there,
don't forget to like and subscribe if you haven't already. You can also support me on Patreon to get
access to bonus content, vote on future topics, and more, or you can check out my website at
emagill.com to find written reviews of plenty more sci-fi classics in both film and literature.
On top of that, I've got a podcast about Apple TV's Foundation,
called Cracking Foundation, that you can find wherever you get your podcasts.
Until next time, though, when we'll aim for the moon and miss, this is The Unapologetic Geek,
telling you to never be ashamed of what you love, as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"Thank you, Frank."
"Funny. Now that I know they won't kill me, I don't enjoy them."