Soylent Green Is What?

I"m not going to pretend you don't know the ending of Soylent Green, but neither am I spilling the beans on this most relentlessly dour vision of a future full up with people but lacking in resources and privacy, and as it turns out fundamental morality. Charlton Heston plays a cop who is supposed to be honest, but in the corrupt world here that only means he's less corrupt than the others. He seeks the killer of a very important man and finds him, though the secret he uncovers at last is much more important to the human race.

It's always nice to see Chuck Connors who plays an unreliable bodyguard and Leigh Talyor-Young is ravishing as a prostitute regarded in this world as mere "furniture", but the soul and center of this movie is Edward G. Robinson. This is his last role before his passing and it's as poignant a send off as one could hope to find. Robinson is Heston's partner named "Sol", a "Book" or someone who gathers details from the remnants of what once was the greatest civilization the world had known. But all he finds is despair as being old enough to remember a world before the coming of the Soylent Corporation, he misses clear skies, green grass and foilage, and food, all sorts of food. He is a man who has seen enough and in a society which is eager to usher you into the hereafter all it takes is a push and the secret of Soylent Green is that for Sol.

The movie is based on Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room about an explosion of people on a world not sufficient to care for them. It's about a world with fragile resources taxed to the limit to just feed the people and it's about a world in which we live liike cord wood, stacked in alleys and hallways and stairwells like so much dust blown into a corner. It's about the end of mankind, and that's really the secret of Soylent Green.

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