In the years after winning his Oscar for Ben Hur, Charlton Heston became an icon for action-adventure and science-fiction films. Many of these films never approached the caliber of the Oscar-winning best picture of 1959, but several of these films, like Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green, have become cult favorites which fans watch time and again, reciting their favorite lines and recalling key scenes.
Soylent Green is a fairly silly futuristic crime story based on a popular Harry Harrison sci-fi novel, Make Room, Make Room. In the year 2022, New York is an Al Gore nightmare come true; it’s overcrowded with more than 40 million people, the greenhouse effect makes each day’s average temperature nearly 100 degrees, and food supplies are reduced to people eating high energy vegetable squares called soylent red, soylent yellow and soylent green. Heston is Detective Thorn, a dedicated policeman, who shares an apartment with a retired elderly professor, Sol Roth, played by the legendary Edward G. Robinson, who appears in his final screen performance.
When a well-known statesman, William Simonson (Joseph Cotton) is killed, Thorn is set in charge of the investigation, and with the research help of his buddy Sol, they realize Simonson was on the Soylent Corporation board of directors and was systematically eliminated because he was deemed to be unreliable with company secrets, especially the source of soylent green. The conspiracy plot is not the most original, especially for the more paranoid 1970s, but Heston’s tough bravado is simply cool. In scenes where Thorn and Sol reminisce over the foods and customs of the old days, it is the chemistry between Heston and Robinson that is truly endearing. While the special effects are minimal and villains played by Chuck Connors and Whit Bissell are one-dimensional, the film still packs a punch.
Sci-fi fans especially love the famed sequence where the disillusioned Sol decides to go “Home,” a public euthanasia institute, where you select the most pleasant manner of terminating your life. And no one ever forgets Heston’s final speech as he reveals the secret of soylent green’s real ingredients.
