Word: darden
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BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES once again pits simians against mankind in the fifth installment of a series that with any luck will not include a sixth. The humans are the scarred survivors of nuclear disaster, led by Severn Darden as the kind of consciously hammy villain that kids love to giggle at during the Saturday matinee. The apes make a curiously pallid bunch of heroes. Roddy McDowall, a veteran of three other Ape epics, appears as Caesar, the idealistic ape who led his species out of bondage to man with a few fiery speeches and some sensible...
...surprised during a desert snooze. The time is about 1880 and the place is a sleazy little ghost town in New Mexico country. Three drifters-Collings (Fonda), Harris (Warren Gates) and Dan (Robert Pratt)-drift into it. Dan is gunned down by a mean, sneaky killer named McVey (Severn Darden). Collings and Harris push on to the farm of the wife Collings had deserted six years before. The wife, Hannah (Verna Bloom), takes on the pair as hired hands...
...hero and his Frankensteinian twin. Occasionally, he perks up enough to look lobotomized; the rest of the time he second-fiddles amid a frantically improvising cast-which includes Novelist Nelson Algren. The only player who truly understands this kind of cartoon is not the blond, bland star but Severn Darden, a refugee from Chicago's improvisational Second City troupe. Darden portrays a mad doctor who would seem far more at home speaking balloons than lines...
...hairbreadth escapes from a herd of foreign agents trying to kidnap him for the secrets in his head and the men from something called the Federal Board of Regulation trying to kill him for the same reason. Coburn romps spryly through the part, with the comic cooperation of Severn Darden as a friendly Russian spy with an Oedipal problem, and Walter Burke as the uptight head of the FBR who exhorts his faceless men (all under 5 ft.): "Kill him . . . the nation expects it ... think of your mothers." Coburn's most dangerous and ingenious pursuer, though, turns...
...before the Pyramus playet, he has a grand time with the alliterative avalanche of b's. The other cronies are passable. The whole sextet of artisans is just no match for their counterparts in the 1958 production: Morris Carnovsky, Hiram Sherman, Ellis Rabb, William Hickey, Will Geer, and Severn Darden...