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From SCIFIPEDIA
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Like No Blade of Grass (1970), Soylent Green (1973) put an SF spin on the growing concern over ecology and overpopulation, and was adapted by Stanley R. Greenberg from the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, creator of The Stainless Steel Rat. Director Richard Fleischer’s solid genre credits include 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Fantastic Voyage (1966).
Charlton Heston was no stranger to apocalyptic, issue-oriented SF, having tackled animal rights, evolution, and nuclear war in Planet of the Apes (1968). Previous projects with producer Walter Seltzer included The Omega Man (1971), another apocalyptic SF film based on Richard Matheson's classic I Am Legend, and Skyjacked (1972), which was also written by Greenberg.
An effective opening montage takes the viewer—at an accelerating pace—from the days of trolley cars to 2022, when the population of New York City has reached forty million, and the greenhouse effect has created a permanent green haze and artificially high temperatures. Heston is Thorn, a cop who lives with his "police book," or researcher, Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson).
Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.
William Simonson (Joseph Cotton) is killed while his bodyguard, Tab Fielding (Chuck Connors), and his mistress Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), part of the “furniture” included with his lavish apartment, are out. Simonson, an executive of the company that makes the artificial food Soylent Green, expects the killer, Gilbert (Stephen Young), who says he has become unreliable.
Thorn's casual corruption is clearly de rigueur as he savors all the luxuries of Simonson’s home while investigating, and suspects Tab of complicity, but he gets no answers from the shaken priest (Lincoln Kilpatrick) visited by Simonson. On the orders of Governor Santini (SF mainstay Whit Bissell), Tab kills the priest, and Thorn’s superior, Hatcher (Brock Peters), closes the case.
During a food riot that erupts when supplies of Soylent Green run out, Gilbert wounds Thorn and then is crushed by a “scoop,” the giant bulldozers used for crowd control. Sol learns the same secret that devastated Simonson, and visits a suicide parlor, where he dies peacefully amid scenes of unspoiled nature (another fine Chuck Braverman montage) and classical music.
Robinson died shortly afterward, giving his death scene a special resonance, and Heston’s tears of reaction were real. "He knew he was dying and he knew this would be his last picture, and he was happy," Richard Fleischer recalled in his memoir, Just Tell Me When to Cry. "He lay there, looking at the ceiling, his face expressing wonder, awe, sheer delight, aching nostalgia."
At Sol's behest, Thorn seeks proof that Soylent Green is made from human bodies, rather than plankton (in the novel, the name "Soylent" derived from soy and lentil), which he confirms after hitching a ride on a disposal truck. Pursued by thugs and wounded by Tab, whom he kills, Thorn is taken away by medics while shouting the oft-quoted spoiler, "Soylent Green is people!"
In John Brosnan's Future Tense, Harrison said, "Obviously the art director had actually read Make Room! because he [Edward C. Carfagno] used all the background apparatus from the book in his sets. And, of course, the background is what it's all about—the background is the foreground. In the book . . . I didn't draw attention to the setting—I just let it sink in slowly."
Frequently criticized for interpolations such as the "furniture," suicide parlor, conspiracy, and cannibalism, as well as the title change (supposedly mandated by MGM to avoid confusion with the series Make Room for Daddy), Soylent Green is nonetheless a visual tour de force. Its effectiveness bespeaks the professionalism, and dedication to the subject, of both cast and crew.
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