Quick Cuts

By J.C.

SOYLENT GREEN is not a park outside London, but a foodstuff supposedly manufactured from high-energy plankton. It is the very staff of life for the beleaguered citizens of smog-shrouded, dangerously overcrowded New York City in the year 2022, where there are nearly 200 murders a day and only a rich man can afford cigarettes. The plot of this intermittently interesting science-fiction thriller is about a cop (Charlton Heston) whose investigations lead him to the true and appalling origin of soylent green. The story is rather less notable than the fact that its alarming social prognosis has already become a cliche. It is all too likely that such ecological chaos may occur, but there have been so many melodramatic warnings about it in essays and speculative fantasies such as this that urgency becomes blunted and worn through repetition. Heston, forsaking his granite stoicism for once, makes a properly gruff policeman, but it is likely that Soylent Green will be most remembered for the last appearance of Edward G. Robinson, who plays a cantankerous intellectual. In a rueful irony, his death scene, in which he is hygienically dispatched with the help of piped-in light classical music and movies of rich fields flashed before him on a towering screen, is the best in the film.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY is a cache of fleeting pleasures collected by Claude Lelouch, who always seems to make films (A Man and a Woman) with the same airy cheer, as if he were mailing out greeting cards. The plot is a congenial sort of caper about a gang of aging delinquents (Lino Ventura, Jacques Brel, Charles Denner, Charles Gerard, Aldo Maccione) who hire themselves out for all kinds of elaborate political thuggery. Since ideology cannot be stashed in a numbered Swiss account, it plays no part in their addled schemes, which include kidnaping a Swiss diplomat and hijacking a 747.

There are some genuinely funny moments: an ingenious auctioning of a political prisoner and a seminar in courting girls on the beach, with each of the five men strutting across the sand like roosters on a bed of burning coals. Although spirits remain high throughout, invention is nowhere near as consistent"Are you Marxists?" a guerrilla leader inquires of them, and their spokesman replies: "Yes--Groucho Marxists." If only they were.

J.C.

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