This is the second part of a three part post on American movie director Franklin J. Schaffner.  Part One is here and Part Three is here.

Franklin Schaffner had a reputation as a competent director, coming in within budget and schedule, when he was given the job of directing Planet of the Apes.  It was to be a huge success and changed the way science fiction was perceived in the movie world.  Planet of the Apes made it clear that science fiction could both be an adult story and a global financial success.

Planet of the Apes

Ape Hunters pose after capturing humans

 

A starship with four astronauts aboard, three men and a woman.  As they enter their suspended animation capsules, their captain, Taylor (Charlton Heston) sets the controls for an automated jump through hyperspace, a jump that will cross time as well as space.

Blackness.

The crew come out of suspended animation with alarms screaming and the ship in a death dive, tearing itself apart.  Taylor struggles to land the ship.  As he pulls the crew from their pods he discovers that the woman crewmember’s pod has failed and that she has died of accelerated old age.

The ship crashlands in a lake in a mountainous desert region.  The planet seems earthlike, the air is breathable.  But where in the galaxy are they? And when?

Its Alpha male time again and then some, because we soon discover that Heston’s Taylor is an absolute bastard.  Hiking away from the crash, there is a marvellous scene where Heston’s surviving crew members rag on him.  In short order we find out that Taylor is cynical, arrogant, unfeeling, power-hungry and a born leader.  We also learn that he was fucking the female crew member and it is implied that he abused his power as ship’s captain to do this.

Heston is unfazed by this hostility and leads his crew through a mountainous desert, filled with menace.  Dry lightning fills the skies and the ground is cracked and broken.

Schaffner takes no little trouble to build our picture of this arrogant Alpha male.  The reason for this becomes apparent when Taylor is captured by the apes.  Only a man who truly believes in himself can survive when an entire world is pitted against him. 

Taylor, on trial by a council of apes

There is also a very funny counterpoint that Schaffner keeps running throughout the movie.  Heston is the embodiment of the proud assertive male, held captive by a female chimpanzee scientist.  Worse, she calls him by the pet name “Brighteyes”.  Even worse, she frequently tells Heston that she finds him “cute”. 

Schaffner also has to get credit for one of the most shocking, thrilling, scary scenes ever filmed.  Taylor has encountered wild humans, when suddenly they are being hunted by unseen foes, to the wailing sound of an alien hunting horn.  As they run through a cane break, armed Gorillas on horseback burst into view and begin firing on them.  Franklin Schaffner makes this happen in split-second shots, one shock after another and never gives the audience time to get its breath.  Masterful.

Planet of the Apes is possibly the least politically correct movie ever made.  Throughout the movie, Taylor never falters in his conviction that men and especially himself, are better than apes.  Compare this to the more recent remake of the movie, where humans are seen as “guilty” of some undefined crime against the universe and the apes are just as good, if different.  This moral relativism robs the re-make of much of the original’s power.

And the casting of Charlton Heston was a master-stroke.  We watch and accept Taylor because some part of us knows Heston as a good, kind, honourable man, from all of his hero roles in the past.  Heston subverts that role-type, but we never quite give up hoping that Taylor will evolve into the Heston hero that we know. 

But anyone who has seen the movie knows that Taylor cannot become the much-loved hero that Heston portrays in other movies.  Like almost all of Schaffner’s movies the ending has an integrity that bears out the movie’s themes.

Patton, Lust for Glory

Actually the sub-title could easily have been “the necessity of great leaders”, though it would not have been so catchy.  “Patton” hits all the bases and does a great job of portraying General George Patton.  This is a rounded, provocative, exciting biography of a great and complex man.  Schaffner gives Patton’s life the benefit of all of his perceptive intelligence.  Though Patton’s story lends itself to a sensational treatment, Schaffner never sensationalises the man.  Schaffner had the good sense to see that Patton was already larger than life.  

George C Scott as General George S. Patton

Schaffner makes it clear that how Allies needed Patton and shows how his inspired generalship helped win World War 2.  But he also shows the wily political soldier, sometimes good, as when he forces his British allies to make the right decisions in his support and sometimes bad, as when he politics for promotions and rank.  Schaffner also shows the lonely man, alone and sad, the victim of his own overreaching arrogance and pride. 

Schaffner’s gift for exposition really serves him well in Patton.  He has to do two things in what is in effect a blockbuster movie.  He has to explain how Patton became the soldier that he is and sketch in some of the military history that informs Patton’s generalship.  He also has to show the audience the strategic geography of the Normandy invasion, without confusing them, but so they understand the threat the Allies face.  He does both of these well.  He sketches out Patton’s life with an ingenious sub-story, whereby a Nazi counter-intertelligence team analyse Patton’s life.  These scenes, intercut with the battles, show us why Patton was a great general, the inner man driving the genius warrior.    

General Omar Bradley (left) and General George Patton

George C Scott looked like Patton, had the manner and body, and had the courage to play the whole man, good and bad.  I do not think that a movie like this will ever be made again, certainly not in Hollywood.  It is too intelligent, too visceral, too real.   By turns beautiful and harrowing, it thrills us with the heroism of our forebears and tells the real story of their sacrifice.  And the music has to be mentioned.  Throughout the film, Schaffner uses the sound of hunting horns to underline his scenes.  They make the atmosphere strange, they evoke feelings of danger, of fighting, of hunting, of blood.  A masterful touch in a magnificent movie.

A masterpiece.

Landscape and mood

 For a New York TV director who started out in tiny studios clad in sound proofing, Schaffner had an incredible eye for nature and for the landscape.  In fact, Landscape plays a crucial part in his movies.  He uses it as a backdrop to enhance or counter-point what his characters are doing, it never just “there”.  In the Warlord, the swampy ponds, the fogs, the weird twisted trees underline the unnaturalness of the costal plain and the pagan village.

In Planet of the Apes the landscape is rocky and unyielding.  There is no soft, comfortable place to be found.  The sky is full of lightning, the soil is arid and cracked.  Even the beaches and cliffs seem cheerless under the sun.  And of course the land holds the secret.  The apes know not to go to the Forbidden Zone, a hostile deadly land that tells of their origins.

The landscape has similar properties in Patton.  But here Schaffner does something different.  He uses the beautiful landscapes of Africa and Europe in a new way, to slow the tempo of the movie.  The camera pans slowly and widely over the entire distance of the landscape. providing a contrast to the cruelty of war.  Men are broken, nature is not.

In Franklin Schaffner’s movies, nature always has a role.  Polluted and deceptive in the Warlord, menacing and unyielding in Planet of the Apes.  In Papillon the jungle is jewel-bright and colourful but absolutely deadly.  In Islands in the Stream even the Caribbean is oppressive, a harsh bright sun and an open sea upon which men bob helplessly, no place to hide.   

Part Three of this post is here