From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Soylent Green is a 1973 American science fiction film starring Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young, Joseph Cotten and Chuck Connors. It is loosely based upon the 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison, about overpopulation, but it diverges to its own pointed plot points and ideas.

Soylent green is the supposedly natural, but really artificial, plankton food product at the center of the story. Because of the film's cult popularity, the term "soylent green" and the famous last line "Soylent Green is people!" have become catch phrases in English. Many subsequent works refer to Soylent Green for either dramatic or comedic effect.

As sci-fi noir example

Soylent Green (1973), the first major American example of sci-fi noir, portrays a dystopian, near-future world via a self-evidently noir detection plot; starring Charlton Heston, it also features classic noir standbys Joseph Cotten, Edward G. Robinson, and Whit Bissell. The movie was directed by Richard Fleischer, who two decades before had directed several strong B noirs, including Armored Car Robbery (1950) and The Narrow Margin (1952).