'Don't give away the ending - it's the only one we have!" implored the posters for Psycho back in 1960. While this may have been true of Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller, rumour has it that Tim Burton had as many as five of them shot for his imminent Planet of the Apes in an effort to preserve the director's vision from Internet rumour-mongers and gossip columnists until the last minute. Burton denies it but, whatever the truth, one can appreciate that coming up with a satisfying conclusion probably caused him a few headaches.
The project being a "reimagining", not a remake, of the 1968 version, Burton understandably wanted to avoid duplicating its memorable final scene - but, if you're resolutely not going to copy, how exactly do you top, or even equal, what is arguably one of the most potent parting shots in cinema history? The original scene - Charlton Heston coming upon the half-buried Statue of Liberty and realising that, rather than having crash-landed on an alien, ape-ruled world, he has been on a future Earth all along - has become indelibly etched on our collective memory, parodied by Mel Brooks in Spaceballs and (a true reflection of its place in the popular imagination) in an episode of The Simpsons.
It's a problem that all film-makers face: how do you end your magnum opus not with a whimper, but with the appropriate bang? No matter how good it has been before the final reel, a movie lives or dies by its ending: it's what the audience will carry away from the experience above all else. That's fine if you can come up with something as arresting as the makers of the 1968 Planet of the Apes; otherwise you risk negating a lot of hard work. Take Independence Day, one of the biggest hits of the 1990s: can you recall the last scene? Chances are that you can't. Now take Carrie. Remember how that winds up? In these days of advance test screenings, unsatisfactory endings are not necessarily the fault of the writer or the director. If a film tests badly, the studio, fearful that its commercial prospects will be hampered, will usually order reshoots to address the complaints.
And it's the ending that is generally most subject to the whims of test audiences, who thus often succeed in ruining the film for the rest of us. The cast of Julia Roberts's latest movie, America's Sweethearts, was recently recalled to film a fresh finale after the original was given the thumbs-down. But the tweaking seems to have paid off, financially at least: the film has just enjoyed a $30 million opening weekend in the US.
Leaving aside commercial considerations, the fact is that Americans, in general, are still most comfortable with a life-affirming, reassuring ending; Europeans generally favour something more disturbing and unsettling. This disparity in tastes is perhaps best illustrated by the case of The Vanishing, a French-Dutch film from 1988 that the director, George Sluizer, remade in Hollywood five years later, shifting the emphasis from the protagonist's obsession with his missing girlfriend to the machinations of the abductor. The original was not released in the US until 1991, distributors believing that its denouement was simply too appalling for American audiences. More recently, the film version of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, no doubt with a nod to the US, was given a conclusion different from that of the novel, with Cage and Cruz reunited after the end of the war and, we assume, going on to live happily ever after.
Americans' fondness for neat, sweet closure seems to be a throwback to the days of the Hays code, introduced in 1930 to guide producers through the moral minefield that was movie-making. Back then, a film's resolution was dictated less by any sense of truth or realism than by what was held to be common decency.
There has been much conjecture on the ending of Casablanca, which, legend has it, wasn't even delivered to the actors until the last day of shooting. But as US critic Roger Ebert argues in his review of the film, this almost certainly isn't true, as the Hays code wouldn't have permitted Ilsa to end up with a man other than her husband. In short, the ending that Casablanca got was the only one it could have had in 1942.
When the Hays code was swept aside in favour of the Motion Picture Association of America and its ratings system at the end of the 1960s, evil could at last triumph on the silver screen, and feel-bad endings were de rigueur: think of Chinatown, or Mean Streets.
But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as films found it ever harder to turn a profit, nervous studio executives sought out "sure things"; soon artistic risks were not being taken so readily. One problem is that only the most revered directors (and certainly not writers) working for the studios have "final cut", though occasionally actors have used their influence in such situations.
According to screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, when New Line Cinema balked at the ending that he had written for Seven and demanded it be changed, Brad Pitt refused to sign up unless it was retained. Pitt's belief in the film was well-founded: it became one of the biggest hits of 1995, proof that audiences do appreciate a jolt now and again.
But all too often Hollywood will insist on a formulaic, crowd-pleasing pay-off.
Hopefully, as one of the few mavericks working in the studio system, we can expect something rather more intelligent and inventive from Tim Burton.
Planet of the Apes opens on August 17th