“Forgotten Hollywood”- Tastes Like Chicken…
Manny P. here… 
“`The year is 2022 and our globe suffers from dying oceans, due to the greenhouse effect, resulting in pollution, overpopulation, poverty, smog, and depleted resources. National governments and its citizens settle on saving the planet by sacrificing the old, sick, and dying. I am not talking about real-life dystopian chatter with regards to correcting the effects of any global catastrophe (including a pandemic). I am describing the 1973 sci fi thriller, Soylent Green.
“`Realism in motion pictures in the early 1970s were clearly the genre du jour with on screen productions such as Dog Day Afternoon, Mean Streets, and Taxi Driver. Offering science fiction as a backdrop to realism was the directed goal in Soylent Green, the most successful attempt at fact and fiction co-mingling since Them! and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“`The villains of this piece are normal folks fighting the threat of extinction, deciding a few must perish so the majority can survive. The Twilight Zone’s To Serve Man episode likely influences this cautionary tale. It is the ingredients that make up the Soylent Green protein that is particularly insidious. Euthanasia is clearly at the forefront of the screenplay’s moral dilemma.
“`Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters, Paula Kelly and Edward G. Robinson head up a stellar cast. Robinson made over a hundred films and this would be his last, since he was suffering from terminal cancer. His final scene in the movie eerily resembled what was to occur just twelve days after the completion of production. By the way, Robinson died before he could accept an honorary Oscar for career achievement, his first accolade by the film academy. His wife accepted his statuette in his place.
“`A fair thriller, New York Times critic A. H. Weiler wrote:
Soylent Green projects essentially simple, muscular melodrama a good deal more effectively than it does the potential of man’s seemingly witless destruction of the Earth’s resources.
“`Well said…
Until next time> “never forget”
This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2020 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Blog by Manny Pacheco. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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