Rewatching PLANET OF THE APES — I am gratified to see that when you type “Planet of the Apes” into the IMDb, this is once more the film that turns up, the Tim Burton adaptation being mercifully forgotten — I got struck by the Roegisms. Did Nic R. see this, like it, and absorb it into his stylistic toolbox?
Case in point: the dramatic zoom in on Heston laughing at the little stars and stripes planted on the planet, a zoom which aims at his face but then misses and shoots off into the sky as Heston’s voice echoes away. A slightly similar effect occurs in EUREKA right at the start, but the space-zoom isn’t integrated in with a character in that one.
But that’s not all — there’s the rocket crash, even before that point, which is really a self-plagiarism by director Franklin J. Schaffner (who has the greatest, crunchiest Hollywood director name ever) since there’s a very similar ski crash at the starts of his earlier THE DOUBLE MAN. Roeg’s splashdown in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is *extremely* similar.
A less obvious one is the descent down a gravelly incline by Heston and his crew, which Roeg also borrows for Bowie in his sf movie. But he reverses the handheld camera descent, so that it’s backing away from Bowie at a low angle, instead of following Heston at eye-level.
APES is edited by Hugh S. Fowler, a Twentieth Century Fox company man all his life, who worked on some fine stuff — but asides from PATTON, it’s kind of hard to detect a consistent sensibility between this, IN HARM’S WAY and WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? But his cutting, and the excellent sound design and Jerry Goldsmith’s score (a game-changer) do wonders to make every angle change a startle effect. Of course Schaffner deserves huge credit for providing such muscular material, along with cameraman Leon M. Shamroy, in gorgeous lifelike colour by Deluxe.
One more swipe — the dinghy’s transit along narrow canyons is borrowed by Michael Anderson for the final episode of his TV Martian Chronicles. And it serves him very well!
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