MovieChat Forums > Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) Discussion > James Franciscus can't compare to Charlt...

James Franciscus can't compare to Charlton Heston


Watched the 1st Apes after many years the other night.

Now i'm 10 minutes into the 2nd with James Franciscus and you come to realise what good and bad/average actors are, even for the time Franciscus may have been good but Heston, you felt every moment with him in the 1st Apes.

Heston lived every second of it, so convincing, you were in that world with him.

James Franciscus's delivery and acting is so forced he may as well be reading from cue cards and have just worked out the scene just before cameras rolled.

Don't mean to bash on him too much but you can see him thinking emoting his lines as he speaks, he is not living it at all.

The scene with Heston and Nova within 15 minutes proves this massive difference.

Saunters in to the set for a couple of days, shoots a few scenes, throws his lines down, you have no doubt the guy is living it, he is right there in the ape world/future.

Goes to show how a good actor can carry a movie and Heston was a damn fine actor even for the time.

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Nobody can match Heston's presence, but I thought James Franciscus still did very well in BENEATH, considering all he had to convey. Especially all of that mutant mind control agony.

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And Franciscus plays a character that sometimes seems like Taylor lite, and at other times like exactly the all American type Taylor scorns.

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watching it now on tcm for the first time, looks like they tried to get someone that was a carbon copy of heston for the role, I even thought it was him when they showed the guy at the crash site

Wait a second.. this is a food restaurant we dont serve salad

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That's exactly what they did.

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"It's better not to know so much about what things mean." David Lynch

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Neither was a great actor, but JF looked a hell of a lot of better in his loincloth.

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