The fourth Apes film is the cheapest and the angriest, a slave revolt staged on a concrete plaza with rubber masks and real fury. J. Lee Thompson cannot hide the budget and does not try; what he has instead is Roddy McDowall and a grievance.
By the fourth film the Apes series had run out of planet and started on the calendar. Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) brought two talking chimpanzees back to the present day and left their infant behind; Conquest jumps to 1991 to show how that infant, now grown, starts the war the first film only remembered. Paul Dehn’s script has one idea and it is a blunt one: the apes are slaves, the city is a police state, and a revolt is coming. J. Lee Thompson directs it without apology.
The budget shows, and Thompson turns that into the look of the film. There are no jungle sets; the whole of 1991 is one real modern plaza of concrete ramps, walkways and blank glass, shot by Bruce Surtees in hard sun and deep shadow so the place looks abandoned while people are still standing in it. Morton Haack puts every human in black, the police in helmets and jackboots, and the apes in colour-coded jumpsuits, so a crowd shot reads as a diagram of who owns whom. Philip M. Jefferies’s interiors are white tile and steel, an Ape Management centre that looks like an abattoir with paperwork. Tom Scott’s score is not the usual orchestral thunder but a jittery, percussive thing, closer to a nightclub than a concert hall, and it keeps the film nervous.
McDowall played Cornelius in the first and third films, and Caesar is a different job. Under the rubber he is playing a young man learning in a single day that everything he was told about the world was a kindness. Watch him at the auction, standing very still while the bidding goes on around him, and in the scene where Breck hands him a book and tells him to choose his own name. He gives the chimpanzee stillness first and then, when the fury arrives, a voice that seems too large for the face. It is the best sustained performance in the series, and it is done through a mask that leaves only the eyes.
The humans are a mixed lot. Don Murray’s Breck is a small-town bully given a city, sweating through his black suit and shouting at subordinates because he can. Severn Darden’s Kolp does the interrogating with a clammy patience. Hari Rhodes has the hard part as MacDonald, the governor’s black assistant who sees exactly what the apes’ condition rhymes with and says so, and Rhodes plays it with a tiredness that stops the allegory becoming a lecture. Ricardo Montalban is courtly and warm and slightly in a different film, which is not entirely a fault; Armando is the last kind man in the picture, and the picture needs one.
We were angrier than we expected to be, and it was the conditioning centre that did it: apes strapped down and taught their commands with flame and electric shock while a calm voice repeats the word and the camera simply watches. It is done cheaply and it works. Then the revolt comes and the cheapness starts to cost. The extras’ masks are a step down from the leads’, the same three corridors are fought over several times, and Marjorie Fowler and Alan Jaggs cut the riot so fast that the geography goes and we lose track of who is winning where. For a stretch of the last twenty minutes we were watching men in rubber heads run past the same glass door.
The ending was altered before release, and a longer cut restoring the original exists; several critics prefer it, and we will describe neither. What can be said is that the last few minutes of the theatrical version do not match the eighty that come before them, and the seams are easy to see.
Against the series’ own standards this is the boldest thing after the 1968 original and the roughest thing in it. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) told the same story with a great deal more money and, in places, less nerve. This one runs 88 minutes and carries a 15, and it does not waste many of them. Watch it for McDowall, for Surtees’s shadows, and for the rare sight of a studio sequel that is furious about something.
