SOYLENT GREEN

SYNOPSIS:
It's the New York of 2022, where overpopulation is rampant and the processed food manufactured by the Soylent company is at a premium.  Here a cynical cop, Thorn (Charlton Heston) is put on a homicide investigation that at first seems to be an opportunistic murder by a burglar.  But as Thorn works on the case, assisted by his elderly research assistant, Sol (Edward G. Robinson), he gradually comes closer to uncovering a secret at the heart of their society.

This influential vision of an overpopulated future has a horrific plausibility that's hard to shake off.  Everyone remembers the bodies cramming the streets or sprawling in the stairways of rundown apartment buildings; the disappearance of the natural world, the incessant TV ads for dubious processed food...  Revisited today, the film seems more than a curiosity but less than a classic, directed inventively if modishly by the ultra-versatile hack Richard Fleischer (responsible for everything from the original Dr Dolittle to Conan The Destroyer).   Fleischer films a food riot newsreel-style, like a documentary of events yet to happen, but also includes some studied far-out imagery (as in Edward G. Robinson's unforgettable death scene).  As we follow Charlton Heston's detective on his trail through the city high and low, it becomes a teeming labyrinth where distinctions between inside and outside are subsumed in a constant feeling of claustrophobia.  The smoggy haze in the streets echoes the greenish or mustard backgrounds in the interiors: colours that are both strong and sickly.  A dated grooviness is most evident in the penthouse of the murdered millionaire, with its beaded curtains, piped muzak and live-in hooker (rented along with the apartment and referred to as furniture).  The traces of Playboy fantasy sit oddly in the usually straitlaced context of the genre, but make a kind of perverse sense given the film's depiction of an economy based around scarcity - where even the most ordinary food items become decadent sensual luxuries.  Of all Hollywood stars, Heston seems ideally suited to the tensions of this situation, a rock-like embodiment of the law whose persona also hints at ferociously repressed animal appetites.   Heston's gravity helps ground the film even at its most potentially ludicrous - though he's not helped much here by Robinson, who forgivably overacts as an old codger - in his final role.
Jake Wilson