Few people reading Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel La planète des singes (translated as Monkey Planet) could have predicted the impact that it would have on the English speaking world. An amateurish piece of science fiction from a novelist who remains best known for his more serious work-such as The Bridge on the River Kwai - Monkey Planet is a Swiftian satire in the vein of Gulliver's Travels in which intrepid adventurer Ulysse Mérou (note the classical reference) finds himself stranded on a technically advanced planet ruled by apes. The novel came and went without causing much of a stir.
When Hollywood producer Arthur P. Jacobs was searching for a new project in 1963, he asked friends and colleagues to find him 'something like King Kong.' Most of Jacobs' acquaintances assumed that he wanted a project with the same kind of box office appeal as the Fay Wray monster movie, but Boulle's literally minded Parisian agent took Jacobs at his word and offered him Monkey Planet. Jacobs read it and was impressed, but it took him four long years of negotiating to convince Twentieth Century Fox to fund the project since the studio executives were convinced that humans dressed as apes wouldn't be taken seriously by audiences. After a test film was shot with Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson (the latter in ape makeup), Jacobs got the green light.
No one could have predicted the box-office success of the feature when it was released in 1968, least of all the nervous studio executives who were desperate for a commercial hit after a long string of flops. Expanding on Boulle's ironic vision of a world turned upside down, the screenplay simultaneously pared down the novel's more comic moments in favour of a heavier satirical punch. While Boulle had been writing in the misanthropic tradition of Voltaire and Swift, the Hollywood version of Planet of the Apes focussed its sights on a very American target, the white male ego.
Unlike his fellow crewmembers, Heston's character-American astronaut Taylor-joins the expedition out of a cynical disenchantment with humanity and progress. The film opens with a monologue from Taylor, recording his last entry in the ship's computer before they enter deep space. Lamenting humanity's propensity for violence and war, Taylor hopes to find 'something better than man.' After the spaceship crashes, Taylor's cynicism comes to the fore. He's so gleeful that their noble mission has been reduced to nothing that one of his fellow crewmembers angrily calls him 'a negative. You despise people. You thought life on Earth was meaningless.' But not even Taylor's cynicism is prepared for what they find - a society ruled by apes in which Man is no more than a dumb animal. As Taylor first lays eyes on the walking, talking, horse riding apes, the camera focuses on Heston's face. Cynicism gives way to abject horror.
Much of the entertainment value of Planet of the Apes is in watching the apes mistreat Heston's character. There's a masochistic enjoyment in seeing Heston, the All-American hero, discover that the wages of hubris are humiliation. Heston himself was quite aware about the iniquities that he had to face on and off the screen. Writing in his journals during the shoot, he acknowledged that 'there's hardly been a scene in the bloody film in which I've not been dragged, choked, netted, chased, doused, whipped, poked, shot, gagged, stoned, leaped on, or generally mistreated.' Commenting on the scene in which Taylor is captured by the apes, Heston claimed: 'It's surprising the perspective an experience like this gives you. Upside down in a net, a man isn't worth much.' Such was the extent of his humiliation that one crewmember commented 'You know, Chuck, I remember when we used to win these things.'
In many ways Heston's casting is the reason for the film's success. Who better than Heston to play the American Everyman laid low by his own arrogance? Who better than this macho, chiselled-jaw hero to star in a film that implicitly rejects machismo, violence and imperialism? Beaten, chased and stripped like some runaway slave, Heston's character isn't even allowed to regain his sense of masculine self-esteem when he escapes the apes. The film closes with him down on his knees in front of a giant stone statue... of a woman. As Erwin Kim, the biographer of director Franklin J. Schaffner, claimed 'If it can happen to Charlton Heston, it can happen to anyone.'
What's more, if it can happen to Heston, it can happen to America itself. Planet of the Apes is a film that sets out to shatter complacency and arrogance. Emerging from the fissure in American culture that opened up as early sixties optimism gave way to despair and hopelessness, Planet of the Apes is significantly influenced by the prevailing zeitgeist. Released at the height of the Vietnam War, at the end of a decade characterised by civil unrest and racial tension, Planet of the Apes is, for all its hectic entertainment value, a very political one. American imperialism - so vividly indicated by the scene in which the stranded astronauts take the time to plant the American flag - crumbles in the face of a race of monkeys who represent America's worst bêtes noires (the Communists, the Viet Cong, the militant Black Power movement).
For all its comic book credentials, Planet of the Apes offers a very serious message about degradation and domination, and it pursues that message so relentlessly that it's hardly surprising that many viewers thought that it was more than just another piece of pulp sci-fi. Not long after the film's release Arthur P. Jacobs bumped into Sammy Davis Jnr. Embracing Jacobs enthusiastically, Davis congratulated him on the movie, hailing it as the best film about black-white relations that he'd ever seen. Jacobs had no idea what the entertainer was talking about.
Whatever the producer's intention may have been, Planet of the Apes is bursting with racial tension. It's a theme that gains resonance throughout the four sequels. In Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, human society uses apes as slaves, training them as waiters, janitors and messengers. Their eventual rebellion is self-consciously based on the Los Angeles Watts riots of 1965 in which African-American protest escalated into a full-scale battle with police.
But the race theme only takes us so far. The apes are meant to be more than just racial others, they're also humanity itself. Primatologists have always treated apes as though they offer clues to our identity; after all, they're the originals who show us where we came from. Scientists such as Jane Goodall have claimed in no uncertain terms that primatology might well enable 'a redefinition of the word man.' If primatology can be seen as an indirect study of humanity, in which primate behaviour becomes a means of gauging the basis of our own behaviour, then the appeal of Planet of the Apes series must surely be read as a comment on exactly that humanity. Like all the best science fiction, Planet of the Apes holds a mirror up to our faces and gives us the opportunity of seeing ourselves - and quite an unpleasant view it is. Surrounded by war, racial oppression and a fragmenting society, the makers of Planet of the Apes feared that mankind no longer deserved to run the planet. It'll be interesting to see how much Tim Burton believes things have changed since 1968.
