Is people!” Frankly, it’s hard to know what’s made the movie such an enduring favorite - the genius of the twist, or the strangulated intensity of Heston’s line reading. Or, as Heston’s Detective Thorn famously puts it, “Soylent green…. Invented by Serling for his screenplay (the book’s ending was, in fact, much closer to the dreadful conclusion of Tim Burton’s ill-advised remake), the revelation - that the distant planet “where apes evolved from man” was, in fact, Earth itself far in the future - was a masterstroke, and one conveyed via the simple, stark, and iconic image of the Statue of Liberty, half-buried in the sand.Īpes star Charlton Heston was a bit of a twist-ending magnet five years after weeping in the sand, he headlined Richard Fleisher’s classic story of a post-greenhouse world and the food supply that nourishes it. That notoriously miscalculated explainer at the end dulls the impact a bit, but this is nonetheless a terrific twist, capping off a spectacular (and spectacularly influential) horror flick.Īpes co-screenwriter Rod Serling loved a good twist ending - this was the creator and key writer of The Twilight Zone, after all - so the game-changer at the end of the original 1968 adaptation of Pierre Bouelle’s novel was sort of a given. merely seem like Hitch doing his thing. But because Hitchcock’s style, even in this stripped-down, low-budget, black-and-white form, was so lurid and Gothic and over the top, the logistics of putting across “Mother’s” secret - the way she’s photographed, her exaggerated voice, etc. Because the film makes such a leap to that ending, it could easily have been handled clumsily or even comically (this was 1960, after all). The mother of all twist endings (see what I did there?), Psycho is also a classic case, stylistically, of the dog wagging the tail rather than the other way around. (And also, many spoilers to follow, duh.) Unlike the last-minute sucker punches of the films that follow, it arrives far too damn early, causing viewers - or this viewer, at least - to spend much of the film’s third act puzzling out the twist and finding its many holes, rather than paying attention to what’s happening on screen. (And before you go clicking through and raging in the comments, Chuck-heads, no, your beloved Fight Club isn’t on here, because Fight Club does not have a good twist ending. But it was neither the first nor the last movie to do that ending, or do it well. It ended up not only nabbing two Oscars (for McQuarrie and Spacey), but also redefining the “twist” ending, becoming a kind of shorthand for a left-field, eleventh-hour plot development that reconfigures everything that’s come before. What seemed initially to be a low-budget indie neo-noir/Tarantino riff became the summer’s must-see movie, launching the careers of director Singer, screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, and co-stars Kevin Spacey and Benicio del Toro, among others. Twenty years ago this week, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects opened in theaters, and everybody lost their minds.
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