Planet of the Apes (1968)

Planet of the Apes arrives from 1968, a year when a film could still stage a full-scale allegory about race and caste and then hand the audience a twist ending instead of a pamphlet. Franklin J. Schaffner's picture deposits Charlton Heston on a planet where apes hunt, enslave, and lobotomize humans, and the arrangement is plainly a mirror held up to an American racial hierarchy. The famous line about stinking paws lands as a slur inverted, a neat piece of rhetorical engineering. None of it arrives as a lecture. The sermonizing, such as it is, stays buried inside the adventure, and the closing shot of the Statue of Liberty does the moralizing in one silent image. For a film with something on its mind, it is remarkably patient.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. Zira, played by Kim Hunter, is a competent chimpanzee scientist, which registered as mildly notable in 1968 and reads as modest now. Nova, the mute primitive woman, exists to be named and led around, and the discarded pregnancy subplot suggests the filmmakers sensed the material could not bear the weight. There is no critique of capital, no environmental conscience (the ruin of Earth is attributed to nuclear war, an older anxiety), no body politics, no neurodiverse representation, and no casting effort a modern audience would recognize as deliberate. Dr. Zaius suppresses evidence of a prior human civilization, which gestures at buried history without reframing any real one.

The makeup won an honorary Academy Award, the film entered the National Film Registry, and it spawned four sequels and a franchise that outlived everyone involved. A parable with a moral and a monkey mask. We have spent the decades since converting such parables into something more explicitly instructive, and the results have not always improved.