Solent Green 1973:2009

Soylent Green is a 1973 dystopian science fiction movie depicting a future in which overpopulation leads to depleted resources, which in turn leads to widespread unemployment and poverty. Real fruit, vegetables and meat are rare, expensive commodities, and much of the population survives on processed food rations, including "soylent green" wafers.

 

Three of the film's characters: Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston), Tab Fielding (Chuck Connors) and Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson)

 

In the film, after the aged Roth learns the truth about Soylent Green, he decides he can no longer deal with the world, and states that he is "going home."  By this, he means that he is going to sign up for government-assisted suicide.  When Roth arrives at the clinic, he is asked to select a lighting scheme and a type of music for the death chamber.  Roth selects orange-hued lights and "light Classical" music.  When he goes to the death chamber, a selection of Classical music plays through speakers and films are projected on large screens.

 

The "going home" score in this part of the film was conducted by Gerald Fried and consists of the main themes from Symphony No. 6 ("Pathétique") by Tchaikovsky; Symphony No. 6 ("Pastoral") by Beethoven; "Morning Mood" and "Åse's Death" from the Peer Gynt Suite by Edvard Grieg.  As the music plays, scenes of majestic natural beauty are projected on film screens: "deer in woods, trees and leaves, sunsets beside the sea, birds flying overhead, rolling streams, mountains, fish and coral, sheep and horses, and lots and lots of flowers — from daffodils to dogwoods."  Amidst the music and the scenes of nature, Roth remembers the world as it once was.  Yet, he cannot peacefully take his last breath as he is pained by the beauty lost and cannot stand the awfulness of the real world.  Roth struggles to tell Thorn about the secret of "soylent green," urging him to "prove it" before taking his dying breath.

 

After Roth dies, Thorn sneaks into the basement of the government-assisted suicide facility, where he sees corpses being loaded onto waste disposal trucks.  He secretly hitches a ride on one of the trucks, which is driven to a heavily guarded waste disposal plant.  Once inside the plant, Thorn sees how the corpses are processed into Soylent Green wafers.  After Thorn escapes from the plant and heads for the supreme exchange with the information, he is ambushed by Fielding and several other gunmen.  In the shootout, Thorn kills some of the gunmen, but is himself wounded.  He retreats into a cathedral filled with homeless people.  After a desperate fight, Thorn stabs and kills Fielding.

 

When police backup arrives, the seriously wounded and nearly hysterical Thorn confides to Hatcher the horrible secret behind Soylent Green and urges him to spread the word: "Soylent Green is people!   We've got to stop them somehow!"

 

footnote: This was the 101st and last movie in which Edward G. Robinson appeared. He died from cancer twelve days after the shooting was done, on January 26, 1973. Heston was the only member of the crew that Robinson told (just before filming the scene of Robinson's character's death.)

---