Soylent Green Details

Charlton Heston is in serious jaw-jutting mode here as the lone honest cop in a polluted and over-populated 21st-century New York, investigating a murder at the company responsible for a new synthetic food product. Harry Harrison's sober novel Make Room! Make Room! has been rather ploddingly adapted with an eye for the box office as a curious update of the private-eye genre with grim glimpses of a future consumer society run amok, though director Richard Fleischer still manages to retain the book's anti-utopian sentiments. Edward G Robinson, in his final performance, gives a very poignant turn as a citizen past his sell-by date, who remembers the tastes and smells of real life.

Lively futuristic yarn with a splendid climax revealing the nature of the artificial food; marred by narrative incoherence and by direction which fails to put plot points clearly across.