Conquest of the Planet of the Apes

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	J. Lee Thompson
Produced by	Arthur P. Jacobs
Written by	Paul Dehn
Based on	characters created by Pierre Boulle
Starring	Roddy McDowall Don Murray Ricardo Montalbán Natalie Trundy
Music by	Tom Scott
Cinematography	Bruce Surtees
Editing by	Marjorie Fowler Alan L. Jaggs
Studio	APJAC Productions
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	USA June 29, 1972
Running time	88 minutes
Language	English
Budget	US$1,800,000 (estimate)
Box office	US$9,043,472

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is a 1972 science fiction film directed by J. Lee Thompson. It is the fourth of five films in the original Planet of the Apes series produced by Arthur P. Jacobs.^[1] It explores how the apes rebelled from mankind's ill treatment following Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971). It was followed by Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). The series reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) has a similar premise to Conquest, but is not officially a remake.

Plot summary

In 1983 (twelve years after the end of Escape from the Planet of the Apes), a disease kills the world's cats and dogs, leaving humans with no pets. To replace them, humans began keeping monkeys and apes as household pets. Realizing the apes' capacity to learn and adapt, humans train them to perform household tasks. By 1991, American culture is based on ape slave labor.

Armando (Ricardo Montalbán) and Caesar (Roddy McDowall), a young chimpanzee horseback rider in Armando's circus, distribute flyers around a large city to advertise the circus' arrival. Armando warns the chimpanzee to be careful; should anyone learn his identity as the child of Cornelius and Zira, it would mean their deaths. They see apes performing various menial tasks, and are shocked at the harsh discipline on disobedient apes. Seeing an ape being beaten and drugged, Caesar shouts, "Lousy human bastards!" Quickly, Armando takes responsibility for the exclamation, explaining to the policemen that it was he who shouted, not his chimpanzee. The surrounding crowd becomes agitated, and Caesar runs away.

Hiding in a stairway, Armando tells Caesar he will go to the authorities and bluff his way out of the situation. Meantime, Caesar has to hide among his own kind (in a cage of orangutans) and soon finds himself being trained for slavery through violent conditioning. He is then sold at auction to Governor Breck (Don Murray). Breck allows the ape to name himself by randomly pointing to a word in a book handed to him and the chimpanzee's finger rests upon the name "Caesar", feigning coincidence. Caesar is then put to work by Breck's chief aide, MacDonald (Hari Rhodes), who sympathizes with the apes to the thinly veiled disgust of his boss. MacDonald eventually figures out who Caesar really is.

Meanwhile, Armando is being interrogated by Inspector Kolp (Severn Darden), who suspects his "circus ape" is the child of the two talking apes from the future. Kolp's assistant puts Armando under an authenticator machine that psychologically forces people to be truthful. Rather than confessing, Armando fights the guards and slips, falling to his death through a window. Learning of the death of his foster father, the only human that cared for him, Caesar loses faith in human kindness and begins plotting a rebellion.

Secretly, Caesar teaches combat to other apes and has them gather weapons. Meanwhile, Breck learns from Kolp that the manifest of the vessel that delivered Caesar lists no chimpanzees. Suspecting Caesar is the ape the police are hunting, Breck's men arrest Caesar and electrically torture him until he speaks. Hearing the confession, Breck orders Caesar's immediate death. Caesar survives his execution because MacDonald lowers the machine's electrical output well below lethal levels. Once Breck leaves, Caesar kills his torturer and escapes.

Caesar leads an ape revolt against Ape Management. The apes are victorious after killing most of the riot police. After bursting into Breck's command post and killing most of the personnel, Caesar has Breck marched out to be executed. MacDonald is spared, and he appeals to Caesar to show mercy to his former persecutor. Caesar ignores him, and in a rage declares:

Where there is fire, there is smoke. And in that smoke, from this day forward, my people will crouch, and conspire, and plot, and plan for the inevitable day of Man's downfall. The day when he finally and self-destructively turns his weapons against his own kind. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under radioactive rubble! When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland out of which I will lead my people from their captivity! And we shall build our own cities, in which there will be no place for humans except to serve our ends! And we shall found our own armies, our own religion, our own dynasty! And that day is upon you NOW!

As the apes raise their rifles to beat Breck to death, Lisa (Natalie Trundy), Caesar's love interest, voices her objection, "NO!" She is the first ape to speak other than Caesar. Caesar reconsiders and orders the apes to lower their weapons, saying:

But now... now we will put away our hatred. Now we will put down our weapons. We have passed through the night of the fires, and those who were our masters are now our servants. And we, who are not human, can afford to be humane. Destiny is the will of God, and if it is Man’s destiny to be dominated, it is God’s will that he be dominated with compassion, and understanding. So, cast out your vengeance. Tonight, we have seen the birth of the Planet of the Apes!

Cast

• Roddy McDowall as Caesar
• Don Murray as Governor Breck
• Ricardo Montalban as Armando
• Natalie Trundy as Lisa
• Hari Rhodes as MacDonald
• Severn Darden as Kolp
• Lou Wagner as Busboy
• John Randolph as Commission Chairman
• Asa Maynor as Mrs. Riley
• H.M. Wynant as Hoskyns
• David Chow as Aldo
• Buck Kartalian as Frank (Gorilla)
• John Dennis as Policeman
• Paul Comi as 2nd Policeman
• Gordon Jump as Auctioneer
• Dick Spangler as Announcer

Original opening

Of the five original films, Conquest is the only entry filmed in Todd-AO 35 using Arriflex ARRI 35IIC cameras with lenses provided by The Carl Zeiss Group, (the other Apes pictures were filmed in Panavision).

Conquest is the only Apes film without a pre-title sequence. The script describes a pre-title scene where police on night patrol shoot an escaped ape and discover that his body is covered with welts and bruises as evidence of severe abuse (in a later scene depicting Armando's interrogation, Governor Breck refers to the "ape that physically assaulted his master," thereby prompting MacDonald to retort that the attack must have been the result of severe mistreatment). The scene appears in the first chapter of John Jakes' novelization of the movie, and in the Marvel Comics adaption of the film in the early 1970s, both of which were probably based directly on the screenplay and not on the final edit of the actual film. An article in the Summer 1972 issue of Cinefantastique (volume 2, issue 2) by Dale Winogura shows and describes the scene being shot,^[2] but it is unknown why it was cut. The Blu-Ray unrated version (which restored many other graphic scenes) does not contain the pre-credit opening.

Original ending

Caesar has Breck marched out to be executed. MacDonald appeals to Caesar to show mercy to his former persecutor. Caesar ignores him, and declares henceforth apes everywhere will repeat the revolt that happened in the Ape Management complex. The revolution will lead inevitably to Mankind's fall after which the apes will dominate the Earth and enslave the few remaining humans. Breck and all the other humans are then beaten to death as the film abruptly ends.

Test audiences reacted badly to the original ending. The studio re-edited the ending with existing footage. The plot twist of the chimpanzee Lisa saying the word "No" was added to the film via dubbing a new voice-over and Roddy McDowall was brought back to record new dialogue. The new ending allowed Caesar to show some degree of mercy and to leave the audience with the hope of peaceful co-existence between apes and humans. This ending was also changed in hopes of getting a G rating from the MPAA as the previous films had. Nevertheless, the film was given a PG rating.

In 2008, a 5-disc Blu-ray Disc set was released, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the movies, with all five films with new extras. This set release contains the original and theatrical cut of Conquest. It contains more footage of graphic violence during the climatic battle scenes and the original dark ending. This version is also released on a separate Blu-ray Disc, but it has yet to be released on regular DVD. This version also shows on the Fox Movie Channel.^{[citation needed]}

Paradox

Screenplay writer Paul Dehn, who wrote and co-wrote the sequels, said in interviews (quoted in The Planet of the Apes Chronicles, by Paul Woods) that the story he was writing had a circular timeline:

The whole thing has become a very logical development in the form of a circle. I have a complete chronology of the time circle mapped out, and when I start a new script, I check every supposition I make against the chart to see if it is correct to use it...While I was out there [in California], Arthur Jacobs said he thought this would be the last so I fitted it together so that it fitted in with the beginning of Apes One, so that the wheel had come full circle and one could stop there quite happily, I think?

—January 1972

References

1. ^ "Those Damned Dirty Apes!". www.mediacircus.net. http://www.mediacircus.net/pota.html. Retrieved 2011-06-30. 
2. ^ Dale Winogura (Summer, 1972). "On the filming of Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes". Cinefantastique 2 (2): pp. 32-33. http://pota.goatley.com/magazines/cinefantastique-summer-1972.pdf. 

External links

• Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at the Internet Movie Database
• Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at AllRovi
• Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at Rotten Tomatoes
• Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at Box Office Mojo