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In terms of the arts, the 1970s were a very turbulent era. In literature and the visual arts, it was the closing of a great fifty or sixty year period of creativity that has yet to be restarted. In music it was a decade that many see as a low point, due to corporate rock and disco. On television it was a Golden Age for situation comedies, from The Odd Couple to the Mary Tyler Moore Show to M*A*S*H to All In The Family, but in film it was even a greater period of creativity, in all genres, that saw the rise of the American auteur- directors like Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese- from the ashes of the old studio systems that had dominated Hollywood for over half a century. These directors wanted to craft literate, arts films for the masses, of the sort that had been staples in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Yet, the studios were trying to keep pace, with socially aware films of the sort not seen since the 1930s.
But, unlike the films of the 1930s, starring actors like Jimmy Cagney and John Garfield (usually co-starring the Dead End Kids), that dealt with social issues in a gritty realistic way, or as realistic as one could get on a sound stage, the social consciousness of the late 1960s and early 1970s manifested itself most in science fiction films, which allowed the Left Wing of Hollywood to preach to the masses under the guise of what most considered little above comic strip entertainment. There was precedent for this approach, for several of the flying saucer films of the 1950s dealt with the political zeitgeist of the McCarthy era- most notably The Day The Earth Stood Still and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. And the early 1960s saw Rod Serling constantly subverting the political conservatism of the time by casting social issues into science fiction settings on his classic sci fi television anthology show The Twilight Zone. Among the studio offerings of this time were the ecologically sensitive Silent Running; George Lucas's first film THX 1138, which dealt with consumerism, group think, and existentialism; and Logan's Run, which hammered away at Communism and state control versus the rights of an individual. Some of the film's references are quite heavyhanded- and reek of the then current Arab oil crisis and rampant inflation. A few jarred strawberries cost $150, and Soylent rations its assorted colored foods- Soylent Yellow, Soylent Red, and the new Soylent Green, reputedly made from 'the finest undersea growth,' in a manner not unlike the gas rationing of the time. Scenes of food riots are eerie echoes of the oil riots at many gas stations during the year of the film's release, and the scenes of crowding, and bodies, live and dead, lying all about are still chilling, as well as influential. A later film like Escape From New York is an obvious progeny. The rest of the script, by Stanley R. Greenberg, however, is rather pedestrian, and fairly standard for a dystopian flick, but Fleischer and cinematographer Richard H. Kline do a great job of filling the screen with interesting images and sounds, to spice things up. The use of soft, dimly lit visuals, murkily filtered, add a Stygian feel to the New York of the film, almost like a colorized version of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr. The only light in the film comes from artificial sources, and were it not for the fashion faux pas the film could truly seem timeless.
The end of the film, where Thorn sneaks into the processing plant where human corpses are made into Soylent Green wafers, is both chilling, and oddly drama-less. In the end, the Soylent minions hunt Thorn down, but he survives long enough to utter the film's catchphrase to Chief Hatcher. Yet, one does not know if it is enough, for Hatcher has already been co-opted, and has a track record of taking the easy way out. Yet, that fact, and its ambiguity, shows that the film does not recapitulate its characters' dilemmas, and has a depth many later, better made films, sci fi or not, do not have. It is also why Soylent Green is still a film worth watching.


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