Love amid a Holocaust: Soylent Green (1973), a Review by Nicholas Stix

During the late 1960s, a onetime movie star (The Greatest Show on Earth 1952, The Ten Commandments 1956, Ben-Hur 1959) rescued his career (or his agent did), by starring in a series of brilliant science fiction pictures. I say that as someone who is no fan of the genre. (For my money, the greatest s-f picture ever was Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, from 1927, which can be seen at WEJB/NSU for free, and without commercial interruption.)

That man’s name was Charlton “Chuck” Heston.


Soylent Green Opening




The three brilliant s-f movies were Planet of the Apes (1968), which is up there with Metropolis; The Omega Man (1971; which was re-made in 2007 as I am Legend), and this one.

Soylent Green is set in 2023 in New York City. The Earth is overheated with two many people living amid grinding poverty, food shortages, squalor and heat.

When Detective Thorn (Heston) leaves the apartment he shares with Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), the friend who is like an uncle to him, he has to climb over dozens of people sleeping on the sweltering stairs.

The food supply is provided by Soylent Corp. A member of its board of directors William R. Simonson (Joseph “King” Cotten) has been murdered. It appears to have been a burglary gone wrong, but the investigator, Detective Thorn (Heston), sent to clear the case, knows better.

It was a planned murder made to look like a break-in.

The other directors at Soylent concluded that Simonson had become “unreliable.”

Simonson lived in a luxurious, “furnished” apartment building. “Furniture” meant both in the traditional sense, and in the sense of the sex slave that comes with each apartment. Beautiful Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young) was the “furniture” that came with Simonson’s apartment, and who will serve the next tenant, as well.

Shirl seduces Detective Thorn into staying with her by offering him a hot shower, which he hasn’t had in years.

Thorn also scavenged whatever he could find in the apartment, like the first fresh, real steak he’d seen years, for him and Sol.

Det. Thorn: “I know, Sol, you’ve told me a hundred times before. People were better, the world was better…

Sol: “Aw, nuts, people were always lousy... But there was a world, once.

•

[Thorn chuckles]

• Sol: “I was there, I can prove it! When I was a kid, you could buy meat anywhere! Eggs they had, real butter! Not this... crap!”

This passage reminds me of the first time I visited East Berlin, in September, 1980. I bought bitter-sweet chocolate, which in West Germany was legally required to contain over 50% cocoa. But this crap contained no cocoa at all! Likewise, the “coffee” was coffee-free. The “Orangensaft” (orange juice) contained no oranges. It was 100% artificial, and looked and tasted like Tang. The only thing that was even partially real was a juice made out of some sort of berries I’d never heard of, Antonsaft, because the communist party was having its party convention, and it had to put on a nice face.

Sol is pushing Thorn to solve the Simonson murder.

Thorn: “Why should I investigate this case?”

Sol: “Because it’s your job, and because you love me.”

Thorn and Shirl have had sex perhaps twice, but it wasn’t just sex. He tells her the new tenant ought to be alright. But that’s not what she wants. She’s already fallen in love with Thorn.

Shirl: “I don’t want to live with him. I want to live with you!”

Thorn: “Live!”

The thing about the scenes with Heston and Robinson is that, although when the latter says “because you love me” he says it with a wry smile, they’re not acting.

Those scenes are suffused with real love.

I don’t know how long Chuck Heston and Edward G. Robinson had known each other, but the latter was dying of cancer while they made this movie, and the former clearly knew it.

When the Motion Picture Academy learned that Robinson was dying, its bosses decided to issue him an honorary Oscar at the next presentation, but old Emanuel Goldenberg (1893-1973), one of the greatest actors to never get nominated (ditto for King Cotten, 1905-1994) didn’t last long enough. His widow accepted the little man in his absence.

The movie is suffused with Holocaust symbolism, which was common at the time, but here it is appropriate.

Cool Hand Luke (1967) also had allusions to the Shoah, but there it was inappropriate. When one of the prison guards takes Luke (Paul Newman) to “the box” (solitary), even though he hasn’t done anything wrong, the guard says he’s “just following orders,” to which Luke says, “But that don’t make it right.”

(Luke is a Top 100 masterpiece, but in spite of its Holocaust nonsense, not because of it.)

In a fit of shameless moral triumphalism, after we beat the Nazis in The War, we declared that following orders was evil. As my first philosophy professor, Richard Magagna at Sullivan County Community College observed, we destroyed over 2,000 years of the stoic military order.

However, Soylent Green is about an ongoing Holocaust. And so, Robinson, who rarely played Jews, played one here. And he is a member of a group of Jewish archivists, who maintain the last library of reliable information. (The “library” is so tiny as to be smaller than my own private library.) Most of the archivists are old Jewish ladies, with a woman who runs the group like a biblical chief judge.