Ted Post’s sequel spends its first half retracing the original with a smaller cast and its second half somewhere far stranger. A gorilla general, a Leonard Rosenman score and a last minute of real nerve; not quite enough for a whole evening.
Two years after Planet of the Apes, Ted Post’s sequel picks up where Franklin J. Schaffner’s film left off and, for its first forty minutes, does the same things again in cheaper clothes. Another spaceship comes down in the desert. Another man in a torn shirt is dragged into Ape City with a rope round his neck. Paul Dehn and Mort Abrahams wrote the script, and it knows it is repeating itself and hurries, and the hurry shows. The film runs 95 minutes, and about half of them are new.
James Franciscus has the thankless part. Brent is Taylor without the temper, and Franciscus plays him as a decent, baffled man who keeps asking where he is. Charlton Heston appears at the start, walks into the Forbidden Zone, and comes back for the end, and his scenes have the air of a favour being repaid. Linda Harrison’s Nova has no lines and does more with a look than the script manages for anyone else. Kim Hunter’s Zira is still the kindest presence the series has, and Cornelius has been recast with David Watson, which is the sort of economy a viewer notices.
The film wakes up when the apes start talking politics. James Gregory’s General Ursus is a gorilla with a podium, and his rally, fists in the air, the only good human a dead one, is staged with the crowd roaring back and the camera set low. Maurice Evans’s Dr. Zaius sits beside him with the face of a man who knows better and will go along anyway. A line of chimpanzees turn up with placards to protest the march and are ridden down. It is broad. It is also 1970, and Dehn is not hiding what he means by it. We laughed at the placards and then felt uneasy about laughing, because the gorillas’ cheering had started to sound like something we had heard on the news.
Then the film goes underground, and here Post and his crew earn their keep. Milton Krasner shoots the Forbidden Zone in bleached, flat daylight and the tunnels beneath it in green and amber, so that Brent and Nova seem to climb down out of a photograph into a stained-glass window. What they find there we will leave alone, beyond saying that there is a congregation, that Victor Buono and Paul Richards preside over it with evident enjoyment, and that Leonard Rosenman’s score, which has been all brass and clatter above ground, drops into an organ mass with the words of a familiar hymn turned inside out. We were unnerved. It was the hymn that did it, sung straight-faced by people who believe every word.
What does not work is the joins. Marion Rothman cuts a film that is two half-films, a western with apes and a horror picture in a cellar, and the seam runs straight across the middle. Once below ground the dialogue explains and explains, and every time the film has a good image it stops to tell us what it means. The gorilla army’s march across the desert is handsomely shot and takes a long time to arrive anywhere. The masks that were so good in the first film are visibly cheaper on the back rows here, and the crowd scenes have the thin look of a production told to spend less.
Schaffner’s film had a joke to tell and saved it for the last shot. This one has a point to make about the Bomb and makes it out loud, several times. The reviews at the time complained that the story could not carry ideas that size, and they were right: the congregation’s rites and the apes’ warmongering each get a good half-hour, and neither becomes more than a sketch.
Then there is the final minute, which is the one thing everyone remembers. We will not describe it. It is the most reckless thing a studio sequel of its era attempted, the film has not done the work to earn it, and we admired the nerve anyway.
Worth an evening if the first film is fresh and you want to see where the series lost its head and found a different one. Otherwise it is a curiosity with a good score and a gorilla who can hold a rally. The 15 certificate looks steep; it was made for boys who wanted apes on horseback, and it gives them plenty.
