Go Ape For A Day

MOVIES

Go Ape For A Day

CREEM’s former Editor, Dave Marsh, recently joined the ranks of Long Island’s newspaper journalists as Newsday’s Pop Music Critic. Here’s his report from a Long Island Drive-in that sponsored an Ape-athon, like many theatres around the country, showing the Planet of the Apes series and introducing the fifth and final movie Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

"They’re the movies of the century," said Spencer Karagiannis, who goes to East Meadow Junior High. And Mark Levine, a member of the “Apes” cult which is growing nationally, told me, quite seriously, “I think it’s going to happen, too... After all, apes created men, so why should it stop there?” Levine, who works at the „drive-in, said he and all of his friends had seen the previous Ape movies three times.

Despite the rather liberal interpretation of Darwinism involved in Levine’s assessment, the Apes series is part of a larger body of movies. (That’s movies, as in popcorn, not film, as in expresso.)

The tradition began, I suppose, with Tarzan and King Kong but it didn’t begin to hit it& stride until the ’50s when rock and roll invaded the drive-ink and created such monsters as The Blob (starring Steve McQueen) and the classic, / Was A Teenage Werewolf

Like thosemovies, the Planet of the Apes series is made for people who perceive movies as TV on a bigger screen. Only the commercials are missing.

The first Ape film, Planet of the Apes, even won an Oscar, in 1969, for makeup. Since a good part of its $5,800,000 budget had been devoted to creating “mutant humans and apes” who were suffering from the effects of a late-20th Century nuclear war, this was an odd instance of art/ commerce parity.

The cult got rolling with that first film, which grossed $26,000,000. It was an easy step to the next, since the first had involved a 21st-century astronaut who got caught in a time warp and ended up in a weird society, the apes parallel of the human 16th century, in which the world was flat, research science was unknown and human slavery and an anti-people church kept the economy alive. At the end, the astronaut, played (fittingly enough) by Charlton Heston, wandered off into the “forbidden zone,” which turned out to be Staten Island. He. ran into the Statue of Libertv out there, half-buried in what I suppose were the sands of time, with a broken arm and a tear in her eye.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes featured a hot war between the chimpanzees and the gorillas, the two leading castes of apes, which resulted in the nuclear destruction of the planet.

Fortunately, the youthful orangutan protagonists and their infant sons escaped in the first Simian spaceship, ran into the same time warp that brought Heston to Apeland in the first flick, and landed in L.A., 1972, just in time for Escape from Planet of the etc. But the messianic duo, with destiny glazing their beady eyes, were shot down in cold blood by an evil presidential aide, because they talked too much.

Not before they had left their verbal infant on in the hands of a benevolent zoo keeper, however. Caesar, as he was known when sold into slavery, led a rhesus revolt which climaxed in little more atomic holocaust, and that was Conquest of..

Battle for Planet of the Apes is predicated on the survival of the crucial good and bad guys, mutants all. Somehow, though, Battle is far-fetched in a way that the others weren’t. The problem certainly isn’t that the dialogue is any cornier, which is impossible, nor that the philosophy is any less sentimental nor that the plot is more farfetched. Maybe the time for the Apes on the movie screen is over, and CBS can move in with their projected TV series.

When Battle is good, which isn’t very often, it is often making reference to other films. If the slave revolt which capped Conquest was a take-off on Spartacus, the burning of Apeville which climaxes Battle is like nothing so much as the siege of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind. When the mutant army advances, their commander wears red goggles which look like Blue Meanies’ rejects from Yellow Submarine, and the battle scenes are as surreal in exactly the same way as Richard Lester’s in How I Won the War.

Destiny is reversed in the end, of course, and apes and humans live on in apparent social harmony, a surprisingly Western philosophical twist for a series devoted to the cyclical nature of history. It is a little cloying to see a statue of Caesar with a tear in his eye, cominating the post-humo sapiens’ future, but that isn’t what’s really bothering me. 1 keep wondering if Mike Levine could really be right. Think I’ll learn to comb my chest, just in case.

Dave Marsh

(Originally printed Newsday Inc.) Newsdav. 1973

THE LAST OF SHEILA Directed by Herbert Ross Written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins (Warner Brothers)

‘Listen, I got this truly beautiful story,’ the man who cuts my hair says to me. ‘Think about some new Dominique Sanda-type unknown. Comprenez so far?’... In [Hollywood] the action itself is the art

form, and is described in aesthetic terms: “A very imaginative deal,” they say, or, “He writes the most creative deals in the business.”

— Joan Drdion in a recent article on Hollywood in The New York Review of Books.

Truly beautiful stories and creative deals: Hollywood is full of them. The movie critics fret over the auteur aesthetic, the fans go to the Rialto to star gaze, and all the while Liz and Dick and Steve and Ali and Paul and Barbra sit up there in Beverly Hills or Switzerland or wherever they sit and mull over the next truly beautiful story which they will appear in thanks to the creative deal their agent has put together for them. Hollywood is all about many things; one of them has always been power and its assorted uses.

The Last of Sheila is a murder mystery and a very good one. It’s about seven rich, rotten Hollywood types on a yacht in the south of France who go about trying to figure out who is killing them off one by one. But it’s also about Hollywood and the whorey glittering power it exudes over the lives of those who live and work (except when they’re on location in Yugoslavia) there. In fact the central gimmick of the piece — a group of stranded people and a killer on the loose — is such old hat Agatha Christie Ten Little Indians stuff that Sheila probably wouldn’t have gotten made if it weren’t populated by a poolful of Beverly Hills types.

Consider the cast: James Coburn as an aging hippie producer, James Mason as a down-on-his-luck director, Richard Benjamin as a scriptwriter who does Italian westerns in order to keep himself and his trembling wife, Joan Haekett, in Vuitton luggage, Raquel Welch as a sex symbol with big tits and small thoughts, Ian McShane as her smarmy agent husband, and, best of all, Dyan Cannon as a nasty, funny, sexy agent. Everybody’s got an ugly little secret, and by the film’s conclusion they’ve all been trotted out in the best All About Eve fashion. Along the way, Sheila works on several different tantalizing levels: as a star-stuffed movie-movie in the Grand Hotel tradition, as a puzzle maven’s delight, what with all the word games and very sneaky clues, and as a cutenasty comedy of bad manners.

But it’s the Hollywood angle that makes it fascinating, one of the year’s best entertainments, in fact. The relationships in the film are cool and very clearly stratified; power, not sex, is what holds this crew together. Wit is used not only for malice or mirth, but, more importantly, to demonstrate one’s mental and verbal agility. After a good wisecrack, the people involved congratulate each other rather than laughing out loud. Everyone’s out to make points, and the solving of the mystery eventually narrows down to a duel of wits played out not for sweet justice but power and the satisfaction of besting the other opponent. In the film’s entirely fitting conclusion, two of the survivors are wondering whether they should call the police or turn the whole thing into a movie.

The ending is especially apt because the people involved in making The Last of Sheila did just what the survivors are contemplating: they took their own life situations, revolving around glamour, power, money, Hollywood, and sex, and turned them into a movie. Sort of like making a painting about a man making a painting or looking simultaneously into two mirrors in a barbershop and seeing yourself endlessly reflected.

If that last one throws you, don’t worry about it. Sheila is first and foremost a very funny, clever, even 'suspenseful movie., with a rip-roaring performance of'•sustained bitchery by Dyan Cannon that confirms her place as the Kitsch Bette Davis of the seventies. It’s a truly beautiful story that must have spawned some very creative deals.

Paul Varjack