Soylent Green (1973)

There was a time when the big concern wasn't climate change or manmade global warming, but overpopulation.  The concern was that the human race would grow so large that it would deplete most of the world of its resources, leading to the wealthiest people hoarding what is left and leaving a large portion of humanity to near starvation and systemic poverty.  With nowhere to house people and too few jobs available society would cease to function.

Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room! predicted this happening in the year 1999 with a worldwide population of seven billion and New York holding 35 million of those souls.  It posited an idea of how life might be at that point.  His novel was published in 1966 and a more scientific look at the problem, The Population Bomb, was published in 1968, predicting worldwide famine once the world reached a tipping point.  Questions of population control and how it may affect what appeared to be dwindling resources (one of the major ones being oil) at the time were a touchstone in both scientific debates and speculative fiction.

Stanley R. Greenberg adapted Harrison's novel into the movie Soylent Green, helmed by veteran director Richard Fleischer.  The time was moved from 1999 to 2022, and the population of New York upped to 40 million, with no mention of the actual world population.  Some names of characters in the book were changed, the plot simplified - it follows Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) as the main protagonist throughout - and large swathes of the story changed.  While Harrison's novel was dark, focusing on individuals' lives as well as the typical human desire to not face hard choices, Soylent Green took an even more pessimistic view of the future. 

Detective Thorn lives in a small one-room apartment with his "book", Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson).  Roth is assigned to Thorn to help him do research on cases and to catch fugitives.  It's hard work since it means using reference materials that are decades out of date, as books have ceased to be printed in large numbers due to shortages of paper and other resources.  Thorn soon has his hands full with the investigation of  the death of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten), a rich executive on the board of directors of Soylent, the company responsible for providing food rations the populace.

It soon becomes apparent that Simonson was murdered, and Thorn, despite higher-ups wanting to bury the case, is determined to find out why.  He also becomes enamored with Simonson's "furniture", Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), a live-in lover and servant that comes with the apartments rented out to the rich.  Thorn's investigations soon lead to evidence that Simonson's bodyguard Tab (Chuck Connors) was involved in the murder plot, but the true danger is not in finding out who was responsible, but why - a secret many are willing to take to their graves. 

Pretty much the ending has been spoiled for decades, but I'm still going to do my usual and avoid it, other than to just say it's something that's been shouted in student unions and school cafeterias around the country after receiving suspicious meat in a burrito.  It is a famous line, but there is more to it, and the way it is written is dangerously close to being hammy and pushing the scene into unintentional hilarity.  Somehow Heston was always able to make some of the most ridiculous dialog sound like Shakespeare. 

The majority of the movie isn't over-the-top or campy.  It is, in fact, a rather dreary and depressing film.  There are elements of humor, particularly the police, without anyone questioning them as long as they get their cut, being able to grab any luxury good they can at a murder scene.  The thought is that  they are entitled to it, as even the room that Thorn and Sol share is a luxury.  People crowd the streets during the day and spend the nights sleeping everywhere they can, as curfews are in effect.  Frequent food riots lead to the police riot squads using "scoops" to control the crowds, literally sending in earth movers that shovel people into holding bins.  The entirety of New York manages to look even worse than it really did in 1973, with infrastructure and civil institutions crumbling.  The only true clean and well-lighted place available to those who aren't rich is where one goes "home" - euthanasia centers that allow people to die while seeing glimpses of how the world used to be. 

Thorn himself is not much of a hero, having been born into the world as it is, although he does have a moral code that he tries to abide by.  It's not one of Charlton Heston's more demanding roles, but he's solid in it.  This is Edward G. Robinson's last screen performance, as he passed away shortly after filming the last few parts of his role, and it is definitely one of his best.  Chuck Connors gets to be a bit of a heavy in this, but it's more to provide an actual villain with a face, since the true villains hide behind the walls of their fortified apartment blocks, while the common people, if lucky to live in a building, usually have one man with a machine gun to make sure order is kept. 

One short story I have read recently mentioned that humans produce speculative fiction - particularly that which warns of extreme dangers and circumstances - and that the popularity of such is one of the few things that keeps humanity from suddenly vanishing from the universe.  I wouldn't go so far as to say Soylent Green itself is that important - it's certainly a well-made and entertaining movie - but the collective fear of overpopulation did result in certain policies that, ironically, have resulted in what may be disastrous drops in population.  We are now at over eight billion people, and approaching 340 million, but a good part of our positive population growth are people still wanting to come here.  The USSR paid people to have as many children as possible and still had a population decline that has affected post-Soviet Russia, while China's one child policy has now raised concerns about it being culturally ingrained to the point where their population will dip uncontrollably.  Much of the positive growth is in India, Nigeria and Brazil, but as they develop further economically that is dropping off as well.

Still, as of 2022 we've exceeded where everyone thought we would be, and it turns out that there is room for all of us after all, and that scarcity and prices of places to live were more due to manipulation and greed rather than not enough space to put everyone.  There are a bevy of other problems we are facing - I don't know if Make Room! Make Room! considered greenhouse gasses as a problem, but Soylent Green is one of the first movies to mention severe climate change, and some of the most striking images in the movie are the daytime scenes with the streets of New York covered in a greenish brown haze.  While the ending definitely does lend itself to hyperbole, the mystery story that gets us there is intriguing, and this movie remains a favorite despite the dated science and the ending being spoiled after all this time.

Soylent Green (1973)

Time: 97 minutes

Starring: Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors

Director: Richard Fleischer