They warn actors to never perform with children or animals. Roddy McDowall worked with, and was, both. The first boy to ever love Lassie, the chimpanzee who promises every dog will die.
In 1971’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Cornelius reveals a plague killed every canine and feline when humans ruled Earth. Apes became pets, then servants. “On an historic day,” he says, “Which is commemorated by my species and fully documented in the Sacred Scrolls, there came Aldo.” Aldo spoke one word of refusal to his masters: “No.” When Cornelius tells this long story, the makeup enhances McDowall’s essential instruments: kind clever eyes, the soft accent blending London boyhood with Old Hollywood adolescence. Aldo ended humanity’s dominion over apes. Escape ends humans’ centrality to Apes. The people are vain, evil, or impotent. Only primates are heroic enough for tragedy.
The interspecies transition tracks a shift between quite different lead actors. Charlton Heston was bombastic, such a Platonic vision of American pop heroism that his given name was literally John Carter. McDowall was a working actor, the moppet-turned-pro precisely famous enough to do a Columbo between Apes sequels. Neither inside the closet nor out, friends with everyone, a keeper of secrets. When Escape opened, Heston was preparing to direct Antony and Cleopatra, a pure manslab of beefchunk Bard. McDowall had just made his one and only directorial effort, Tam Lin, a dream-folk melodrama starring Ava Gardner as a wealthy older woman surrounded by swung British youth.
McDowall loved a vivacious broad. In Escape, Cornelius’ magnificent wife still runs the show. But the movie confirms McDowall as Apes’ linchpin personality. Here begins two trilogies about a sensitive outsider pushed to violence by a mad world. Necessary to note, Aldo fits nowhere in the first movie’s canon, when ancient human domination was the orangutans’ secret. Escape escapes its own history. Wildland action get replaced by a metropolitan thriller with fashion montages. When I was young this was the traitor sequel. Now I love it. Did the future change Escape, or did history change me?
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