So, this week is the last TFM for the year and I whipped up a sharp new header for it!

The Year: 2022. The Place: New York City.
The Population: 40,000,000

...a dystopian future in which the population has grown to forty million in New York City alone. The water and soil have been poisoned, and pollution has produced a year-round heatwave due to a “greenhouse effect.” Most housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and food as it is known today is a rare and expensive commodity.

It’s somewhat unnerving when some aspects of those scifi movies of my youth start popping up in the news. Certainly, seeing a movie from the early seventies talk about the greenhouse effect and reading any of a number of headlines about Global Warming is a bit alarming.

Soylent Green was one of a series of scifi movies Charlton Heston appeared in at this point in his career. As a kid, these films were my first exposure to the actor - it was only later I would see him in other flicks like the Ten Commandments or A Touch of Evil and realize he was something more than a B-movie actor.

The other thing about Soylent Green aside from the line that has become a parody of itself, is that it was the last movie for Edward G. Robinson. Ironically enough, the star’s last appearance on the big screen was a death scene where Robinson is ushered to his end in by Eight Is Enough’s dad Dick Van Patten no less!

Aside from the irony of having the dad of a show named Eight Is Enough in a flick that touches on the hazards of overpopulation - further proof that the gods have a sense of humor is found in this little item:

Van Patten was in the news in early December 2005 for lending his name to Natural Balance, a line of high-end dog food that is intended to be indistinguishable from stews and other dishes that are normally intended for human consumption. He has demonstrated this by eating, on at least one occasion, his own brand of dog food in tandem with some pet.

Getting back to the film though, you can watch a portion of it below. It’s probably one of the best scenes in the movie and I remember as a kid how effective it was in making me tear up:



Soylent Green wasn’t considered high entertainment in its day but what is interesting is, how this last appearance of Robinson on screeen holds up so well many years later. As death scenes go, especially in scifi flicks, Robinson’s performance as a man who has grown tired of living is what makes the movie so very special. One of the things I came across while looking up info on the film was that Heston’s tears in the scene were real as he was on of a select few to know just how sick Robinson was when he was filming this scene.

In closing, this movie is a must see if only to be able to hear the origin of this line.