Hunger Games: Soylent Green (1973)
Can a movie be a mystery when the novel isn’t?
Dystopian fiction often reflects society’s current hope and fears. When Harry Harrison wrote Make Room! Make Room! in 1966, he tried to address all of society ills (overpopulation, starvation, climate change, excessive industrialization and corporate greed) in one novel. The adaptation focuses on these issues, but adds a murder mystery that is not present in the original novel. Director Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green 1973) is a futuristic neo-noir that creates murder mysteries out of the events in the novel and ends up conveying the themes better than the original. We take a break from reviewing mystery novels adapted into films to discuss a novel that was adapted into a mystery film.
The Story
It’s 2022, and the combination of over-population and climate change have decimated the world’s food, water and housing. Everyone is reliant on a processed food source known as Soylent, manufactured from plankton. Detective Robert Thorn is called into investigate the murder of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotton) one of the few wealthy enough to live in comfort. Thorn investigates Simonson’s bodyguard Tab Fielding (Chuck Conners) and is drawn to Simonson’s concubine Shirl (Leigh Taylor). With help from his researcher Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), Thorn realizes that someone conspired to assassinate Simonson, but is at a dead end when the assassin is killed in a riot and the investigation is ordered closed. When Roth realizes that the oceans no longer have plankton, he decides on euthanasia, but whispers the secret reason for Simonson’s death to Thorn.
The Adaptation
Harrison’s novel is largely a description of living in a world where the wealthy have anything they want, at the cost of the population at large. The dystopian world Harrison imagines has few rules except to find enough survive, and literally have enough space to live in. The novel has a murder, but it’s mostly an accident rather than a conspiracy. The purpose of the story is social commentary, and there are a lot of monologues about how society went wrong, but not a lot of progress in Thorn’s investigation. Lost in the dystopian future, the characters wander, meeting and connecting and then drifting apart as survival becomes the only goal. While the world is evocatively portrayed, there isn’t much of a story.
The movie creates a murder mystery and conspiracy to power home the story’s biggest reveal: how Soylent Green is created, which barely stated in the novel. The movie is a neo-noir, and Thorn, while clearly opportunistic and not particularly enlightened when it comes to women, is a man of integrity outmatched by the corruption of society. The murder of Simonson is considered necessary by all, including himself, as he can no longer live in a world so rotten. Thorn might uncover the truth, but like many noir detectives, he is not just battling a murder, but the corruption of society at large.
Director Richard Fleischer evokes the world envisioned by Harrison — crowds rioting over insufficient rations in a dusty market while the elderly daydreams of things they had in their youth, such as real strawberries and paper books. Everyone not lucky enough be one of the few living in luxury is sweaty and grimy; the movie’s tones are uniformly ochre, grey and olive, the colors of industrialization gone mad. But Fleischer improves on the book in many ways. Sol’s monologues are left out, but Robinson’s expressive face tells us all we need to know about what the world has come to. The use of Golden Age actors (Heston, Robinson, Cotton) add to the lost nostalgia; we remember when they were young and in simpler movies made in simpler times. In the novel, Shirl moves in with Thorn, but the characters in the movie are far too cynical, and practical, to even get that far. Their affair has nowhere to go, and they return to their lives.
The social commentary might be the point of both the movie and the book, but creating a mystery out of Simonson’s death gives the audience the thrill of discovery. The miserable world they have been seeing is far more depraved underneath than on the surface. The movie’s reaction of a mystery allows the audience to innocently think that finding the murderer will result in justice and a return to order. Instead, the reality is that anyone with decency, like Sol, Thorn, Simonson, or the priest he confides, simply cannot handle the truth and becomes a liability to society. Thorn solves the murder, but nothing can change; the world is far too ruined. The movie’s use of the conventions of murder mystery keep the audience hopeful, only to point out that some societal damage cannot be healed.
