YOM Blog Review: Soylent Green

Watching a movie can be tough when you already know the ending, especially when it can be easily discovered by taking a look at just about any list of all-time famous movie quotes.

Soylent Green places Charlton Heston's hardboiled Detective Thorn in New York City in 2022. However, the movie's view of the future isn't quite flying cars and robot servants. Instead, Thorn faces a dystopic, overcrowded world where homeless people sleep in piles on stairs and make it nearly impossible to walk down the street. Due to the overpopulation and very limited resources, people survive on very small food rations of processed food - the newest and most popular one called Soylent Green.

Thorn is thrown into a murder case after wealthy businessman William Simonson, played by Joseph Cotten, one of my favorite classic movie actors, is killed. In his brief screentime, Cotten shows great humanity as the aging, morally torn businessman, who willingly surrenders his life at the hands of a bounty hunter. Cotten's muted performance is trumped only by Edward G. Robinson's portrayal (his last, in fact) of Thorn's elderly roommate Sol.

Robinson's character is very important because he represents for Thorn a living bridge to understanding how humanity used to be, or the state of humanity when audiences first saw this movie. Sol understands texts, helping Thorn solve his cases by simply reading books and analyzing texts, a "skill" that is implied to have gone by the wayside by 2022. It is Sol that supplies the intelligence and emotional drive of the movie. By, once again, simply reading a text, Sol is the one who figures out that the plankton supposedly used to make Soylent Green no longer grows; instead the food is processed from dead bodies, the big twist of the movie and the big statement made about what can happen to society if we aren't economical with our resources.

When Sol chooses to undergo assisted suicide at the end, he does it for two major reasons: to escape from the dregs of society and, essentially, to provide food for more people. This scene is both beautiful and, deep down, extremely depressing. In this depiction of society, older citizens undergo assisted suicide by taking some pills before viewing images and listening to music of their choice. As Thorn watches the scene from the other side of the glass, we see images of flowers, deer and an Earth that is beautiful, harkening back to a time when the world wasn't terrible. However, the visuals serve as just a temporary Band-Aid to briefly erase the imagery of the now-downtrodden world.

You don't have to look up the movie's IMDb page to know that this film was made in the 1970s (1973, to be exact). Although the story takes place in 2022, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of imagination applied to how the world might look then. Instead, the hairstyles, the clothing and environment look like they haven't escaped the '70s. If somebody misses the exposition in the beginning, he or she might assume the society portrayed is a reimagined version of the '70s.

Interest to Young Fans

The most obvious draw of this movie is the famous last line "Soylent Green is people," screamed by a wounded Thorn after he sees the bodies of Sol and others manufactured into the food. Having only heard the line quoted by others, I was taken aback when I finally saw it onscreen. I had always imagined the line was said as a form of surprised revelation; instead, it is uttered in crazed, close-to-breathless screams. Frankly, even knowing how the movie ends, it's still shocking.


Soylent Green takes a very interesting (read: degrading) view of woman's role in society. In the movie, women are treated like furniture; in fact, they are called furniture. All of the major female characters introduced in the movie are furniture, meaning they come with the residence they live in, serving as mistress, maid and any other role the man desires.

Other than that, this movie might not necessarily have a huge youth draw, although the movie has Charlton Heston, whose name is probably the only mainstream one in the movie that young non-classic-movie-watchers might recognize.

How to Get into Old Movies...Part 6

Part 6: Take a Film Class

Many high schools and most colleges offer at least some sort of film class. The larger a college's film department, the more diverse these classes happen to be.

Sometimes when we watch movies, especially ones we're not all that into, we might just get up and leave. Or we might not try all that hard to pay attention.

Although I would never encourage forcing anybody to watch anything a la Clockwork Orange, there is something to be said about being sat down and shown a movie as opposed to voluntarily watching something. Although I think you should watch something because you want to watch in, sometimes we gain interest in something without expecting to or via somebody else's suggestions.

Plus, especially in the case of college courses, the professor is usually somebody who knows the ins and out of just about every scene and can tell you the symbolism behind certain aspects of movies, as well as how certain movies fit into the pantheon of film history.

Film classes can also help you revisit movies you had seen once and give you the opportunity to see or experience certain things you either didn't notice or didn't fully appreciate the first time around. In my own case, I remember watching The Searchers on my own and then watching it again a few months later in a film class. I liked it a lot the first time around, but absolutely loved it by the end of the second viewing, boosted greatly after my professor pointed out the undertones of Ethan's (John Wayne's character) unspoken, yet subtly suggested love for his sister-in-law.

Since this series of posts is all about getting other people interested in classic movies, I would suggest taking the class with a friend or suggesting that he or she take it with you.

Ways for a Young Person to Get into Old Movies

This is something I always think about. It seemed really easy for me to get into old movies. I started watching them with my dad more than a decade ago, starting with Robin and the 7 Hoods and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and then really got into them again back in 2007 when I tried to watch all the movies on the American Film Institute's reduxed Top 100 list.

But, for others, black-and-white just seems like a barrier, a hurdle that is impossible to clear. And for many people nowadays, classic movies just don't have that pop to which so many have become accustomed: the special effects, the camera tricks and the like.

I'd like to introduce a series of easy methods and tips for easing one's way into the classics for classic movie upstarts or those trying to introduce their friends or family to the classics. Like swimming, if somebody just jumps right into the deep end of classic movies (early Hitchcock like Secret Agent or, say, Todd Browning's Freaks), he or she is bound to avoid swimming again at all costs.

In addition, if anybody has any additional tips, I would love to hear them.

-Steve

"Watch something with color..."

A few months ago, my roommate walked into the room and saw me watching the movie, "Born Yesterday" on Turner Classic Movies. Well, to me it was "Born Yesterday." To him, it was just some black-and-white movie.

This was when the lecture began. He explained to me that it isn't right for somebody my age (22 at the time) to watch anything that lacks color, that black-and-white essentially equals boring. In a way, I see where he is coming from. The way we view movies now is different from how we watched movies years ago. The way actors act now is different from the way they did before.

The truth is that I have a deep appreciation for all movies - old and new - especially those that have the uncanny ability to spark some sort of emotion or feeling from deep within, whether that emotion be happiness, sympathy or confusion. While many new movies are great at this, older movies have that special something.

The brilliant thing, to me at least, about movies from the '30s, '40s and '50s is the obvious reliance on acting and performing and drawing as much storytelling power as possible, sometimes from the simplest of film concepts, scripts and even sets. On top of that, it is almost mesmerizing to see an old movie for the first time that has dramatic themes similar to movies you may see nowadays.

I would like to use this space to, first, do what just about every classic movie blog does: analyze classic movies and explain why they are so important to us. Second, I would like to apply an added perspective as a young fan to the mix to give everybody a taste of why and how a young person can enjoy movies that were made almost a half a century before he was born.

I hope you enjoy.

-Steve