Onward and Apeward

In the last episode, you remember, Zira and Cornelius, the egghead chim- panzees who had come back from the year 3000 via a time warp, were hunted down and killed by their human hosts, who were frightened by the prospect of a future world run by apes. In the next installment, to be released later this month, the chimpanzees' destiny is fulfilled anyway, as Zira and Cornelius' son Caesar leads a revolt of the simians, who begin to build their own civilization and await the arrival of Charlton Heston. the famous astronaut whose visit was described in Episode 1 . . . Anybody who is confused--or thinks that he has wandered into a children's matinee--has not been following one of the most successful movie series since the progeny of Frankenstein. Twentieth Century-Fox's Planet of the Apes( 1968) and its sequels. Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) and Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), have already taken in $135 million at box offices round the world and become the objects of a minor cult. Next month. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes will find a huge readymade audience of ape addicts, including many intellectuals who enjoy the series' broad, cartoon-like satire of human faults. Keeping both the cultists and drive-in trade happy has taxed the ingenuity of the creators. The second film was planned as the finale, says Scriptwriter Paul Dehn, and "they told me to destroy not only the entire cast but the entire world, which I duly did."

The trouble was that Apes 2 was so successful that Producer Arthur Jacobs told Dehn to come up with a third. Dehn's solution: Send some of the apes back to the present and show (in No. 3) how the whole story started, then (in No. 4) how the apes took over a major city, and (in No. 5, tentatively titled Battle for the Planet of the Apes) how the apes, like the humans who preceded them, began to ruin the world. "Up to now," says Dehn, an English poet and author, "the blame has been entirely on the humans. But I think now the apes are going to share it."

Spartacus. Says Roddy McDowall, 1who played Cornelius in two of the movies and who plays the simian Spartacus in the upcoming one: "Now I know why monkeys hate people. When I get dressed up that way, everybody stares and points and yells, and you have no identity. You feel helpless."

All the pictures have had deliberate racial overtones that are far from flattering to whites; the oppression of the apes has been equated with the denial of civil rights to U.S. blacks. In Conquest, the racial parallel will be explicit. The climactic uprising, says Dehn. "is a little bit like the Watts riot."

In Apes 5, the apes begin to squabble, just like humans, foreshadowing a social order in which orangutans are the scientific elite, and gorillas the warmongers. The chimpanzees, who are like Bloomsbury intellectuals, merely think. "They're all terribly like Bertrand Russell, my chimpanzees," muses Dehn, in what presumably is a compliment to both sides.

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