RIP Charlton Heston

To many a young film goer Charlton Heston might only be the crazy old man at the end of Michael Moore’s documentary on gun culture, “Bowling for Columbine”.   Ambushed by Moore’s guerilla tactics, unprepared for a barrage of questions pertaining to his role as head of the notorious National Rifle Association and an interviewer who refused to show deference to his super star status, he was cruelly exposed.  Contemporary cinema has offered few more poignant images than that of a stooped Heston, hobbling off in retreat after being bested in debate by the type of smug ‘liberal’ that he could have eaten for breakfast in his prime.  It plays like a sad parody of a conventional Hollywood fadeout.  An American icon is deconstructed before our eyes.

It has never been established whether Heston was then already suffering from the Alzheimer’s disease that effectively ended his career soon after.  Much like his old buddy Ronald Reagan Heston’s utterances and actions could be read as ‘mad’ by his political opponents long before he was clinically diagnosed as such.  The catch phrase that he was best known for in later years, a bizarre bit of rhetoric that talked of how the gun control lobby would have to wrestle weaponry from his “cold dead hands” if  it wanted to mess with his constitutional rights, points to the way he conflated his screen roles with his real life political persona. 

Heston the actor and the movie star deserves to be remembered for a lot more than this.  No performer dominated the epic like he did,  balancing an always appropriate sense of  his character’s grandeur with the real and the intimate.  Two roles for Cecil B de Mille, a circus ring leader in the all star best picture winner, “The Greatest Show on Earth”, and Moses in “The Ten Commandments”, established his credentials.  A richly deserved Oscar in “Ben Hur” made him immortal.  Heston is equally impressive in quiet scenes of anquish, struggling to come to terms with his family’s leprosy, as he is at the centre of Hollywood’s most celebrated action set piece, the film’s chariot race.

If later epics like “The Agony and the Ectasy” and “55 Days at Peking” lacked the dramatic weight or box office success of  his early work it was no fault of Heston’s.  He demonstrated his range in westerns like “The Big Country” (stealing the film from Gregory Peck) , “Major Dundee” and the cult “Will Penny” before finding a niche in the cycle of late 1960s/early 1970s science fiction.  “Planet of the Apes”, despite or perhaps because of the melodramatic overplaying of its closing scene, became a defining role.

Heston’s most significant contribution to the medium may well have been his insistence that Orson Welles be hired as the director of “Touch of Evil”.  This afforded him a brilliantly written and nuanced part in a genuine masterpiece.  Perhaps there is a certain irony in the fact that this most WASPish of political personalities is cast as a liberal Mexican policeman, but Heston would not have seen that way.  Whatever the flag waving, gun toting insanities of his dotage, he marched with Martin Luther King when it counted and was always quick to remind the world of such.