As the Planet of the Apes series continued — following the 1968 original, 1970’s Beneath and 1971’s Escape — it no longer seemed to be a question of whether or not there would be another sequel, but how quickly it would be mounted. Even before the release of Escape, talk had turned to a fourth entry, to be called Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
In detailing the genesis of his scenario for the film, screenwriter Paul Dehn explained, “It is about the intermediate stage. If you remember, there was a plague of cats and dogs which was discussed in Apes 3, when all the cats and all the dogs on Earth had died. So the human race was without pets and they started looking around for something else and began to get monkeys, which was all mentioned in Apes 3.
"The monkeys," he added, "were, at first, pets like dogs, and like dogs it was found that they could be taught to do simple things, menial tasks like fetching a newspaper, bringing in master’s slippers and, being apes, they were far more intelligent than dogs, so very soon they began to do very much more difficult things like bed-making, cooking, sweeping, and cleaning, and they became the servants of mankind. Having begun as pets, they end, as our film opens, as slaves.”
In brief, the plot has Caesar (Roddy McDowall), the grown up child of Cornelius and Zira, arriving in Los Angeles and ultimately leading the slave apes in revolt against their human masters, thus paving the way for apes to rule the planet.
“[Producer] Arthur Jacobs wanted to go back to a kind of scale-and-scope-size film,” explains associate producer Frank Capra, Jr. “He didn’t want to try to recreate something along the lines of Escape. He wanted to go back to a more traditional Planet of the Apes theme. Arthur’s feeling was that each time we had to do something new so the audience would come again and say, ‘Gosh, that’s something we hadn’t thought of. That’s a new twist; a new piece of action or a new character.’ Because it’s pretty hard to keep telling the same story. Although we were within the larger sense of telling this arc of a story of how the apes rose. We had that as an overall umbrella and we had to figure out how to do it within the time frame.”
While Capra admits that he’s not sure how far to “the left” Dehn may have been socially, he’s absolutely convinced that director J. Lee Thompson was definitely trying to create an allegory to the Watts Riots of the early 1970’s.
“The imagery of the Watts riots had been played on television night after night after night,” he says. “Television covered it enormously, day and night, so these images were just in everybody’s mind, especially in the LA area and probably most of the country. They were certainly in J. Lee’s mind. Here we were talking about some sort of uprising at night in the city, and he saw there was an immediate connection. Even though he wasn’t saying, ‘These are black people rising against white people,’ the imagery of the riot created in his mind the kind of look that he wanted to create in the riot scenes and did. One of the reasons it was successful is that people who went to see the movie were harkened back to those images from about a year before.”
For Thompson, one of the reasons the film has such power is because of McDowall’s riveting performance. “Roddy was marvelous,” Thompson enthuses. “He would approach these roles as if he were doing Shakespeare. And each one individually, as if it was the first film. You would think, seeing him in Conquest, that he was playing the role for the first time. His enthusiasm and the way he would talk was simply amazing. He would discuss each scene as if he were doing Shakespeare -- which was marvelous. That was the success of it, because that character became like a real person. It’s a wonderful piece of acting, actually. Very underrated.”
In its own way, the conclusion of Conquest was as powerful as anything that the series had offered before. The city is in flames, humans are dying by the dozen, gorillas have brought the battered body of Governor Breck (Don Murray) to lay before Caesar, and Man’s fate is not...hopeful. “Conquest was a really good, strong, political statement,” offers Thompson. “In fact, the original film was so strong that it couldn’t be shown. You know, we had to take it back into the editing room. We were getting complaints at the preview in Phoenix. It was a very violent ending and we had to change it around and make it a happy ending.”
Offers Capra, “To end with the end of the human race was dissatisfying to us. It colored Caesar. Instead of being a flawed hero, he was a villain and you really didn’t want that. That would have been the last image of him, screaming, ‘That day is upon you now!’ It was a pretty violent ending. J. Lee had show the bejeezus out of it. When it was on the screen it was scary. It was just too strong and it detracted from the film.”
The solution: fix the problem in the editing room. By recutting the existing footage and dubbing in new dialogue, the producers opted for a more “upbeat” ending. The reality is that the change is very obvious, and fairly ineffective. In the final film, when Caesar proclaims, ‘That day is upon you now!’, it’s suddenly as though a light switch has been thrown and Caesar realizes that it’s all been a mistake; that they must shown compassion to the humans.
“The ending was watered down a lot,” states Thompson. “I was very unhappy, but had to do it. Arthur had to deliver a PG to Fox. It would have been an R rating, because of the violence in the end. I had to water down all of the violence, too, and switch it and make it happier. By changing the ending, I personally feel we were copping out, because it wasn’t the ending we intended. But I thought it was correct in terms of film entertainment to cop out, because I have no right to take an Apes film and really make it such a strong political platform. It was a merciful ending. It certainly sent people out happier. It was a cop-out, but it was one that I agreed with 100 percent.”
Capra admits, “Unfortunately, we didn’t go a very good job of fixing it. We were really under the gun and had to go out with it. The re-edit had to be done as fast as possible. We could have done it smoother given a little more time, maybe reshot a closeup of Roddy. It should have originally been written and sot that way in the first place, which would have smoothed the transition and not made it seem so abrupt. We had to fix so much. To do it right, we would have had to have rewritten it, reshot it and have Caesar gradually come to this reflection. He’d become all the better for stopping the battle, but since it wasn’t written that way, we didn’t have anything we could do. So we had to use close-ups and cut out his mouth and put a voice-over, which was not matching very well. We could have done it better if we had another week or two, but we didn’t.”
In many respects, the Planet of the Apes story arc had come full circle and the real question became: what could they possibly do next? The answer would be revealed in 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes.
The above is an edited excerpt from the book Planet of the Apes Revisited, written by Joe Russo, Larry Landsman and Ed Gross, which is currently being revised and expanded.