ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES

   Film (1971). Apjac/20th Century-Fox. Dir Don Taylor, starring Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Bradford Dillman, Natalie Trundy, William Windom. Screenplay Paul Dehn, based on characters created by Pierre BOULLE. 97 mins. Colour.

   This is the third of the five PLANET OF THE APES films. When the late UK screenwriter Paul Dehn - author of Quake, Quake, Quake (coll 1961), a series of parody verses, illustrated by Edward Gorey, on the aftermaths of the nuclear age - had been working on the second (BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) he had been told it would be the last, so he decided to end the film by destroying the whole world with an atomic explosion. Four months later he received a telegram from Fox saying: "Apes exist, sequel required." His ingenious answer was to send three of the apes by TIME TRAVEL back to before the world exploded. They arrive in the contemporary USA and immediately become the centre of a violent controversy which results in their deaths, but not before the female who featured in the first two films has given birth to a baby ape. This mixture of SATIRE and action/adventure is much more sentimental than its hard-edged predecessors, but more entertaining than those that followed. The novelization is Escape from the Planet of the Apes * (1974) by Jerry POURNELLE.

   JB/PN