Charlton Heston, RIP
11 comments April 6th, 2008
When I posted that picture of Charlton Heston from SOYLENT GREEN a few days ago, I never would’ve thought I’d be writing about his death today. Heston was one of those actors who, love him or hate him, seemed like he’d be around forever. Even though he had Alzheimer’s and hadn’t appeared in a movie in half a decade, his death still doesn’t seem quite right.
I mean, if the total breakdown of society – in triplicate! — couldn’t bring him down, what could?
I realize Heston is best known for playing Moses in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, and that he won his Best Actor Oscar for BEN HUR, but I’ve always liked him best in what I call his World Gone Wrong Trilogy: SOYLENT GREEN, THE OMEGA MAN and PLANET OF THE APES. In each movie, Heston played the last real man in a world gone mad, either thanks to overcrowding, a disastrous pandemic or highly evolved apes. Whatever the calamity, Heston faced it the only way he knew how: Fists and jaw clenched tightly, bravely (and sometimes recklessly) facing the enemy.
Oscar or not, Heston wasn’t exactly the greatest actor in the history of cinema — but he was a heck of a screen presence. His politics aside (and with Heston, the politics were part of the package), I always enjoyed watching him onscreen. Even when things had collapsed around him, he seemed to be enjoying himself on some level, and in all three movies in the World Gone Wrong Trilogy, he brings a sly sense of humor to the role, no matter how humorless it might have been written. The glee with which his detective loots a rich guy’s apartment in SOYLENT GREEN brings added dimension to a character that, in the script, barely had one.
And, let’s give the guy credit for one more thing: Back in 1958, when he was a major movie star (having played Moses two years earlier), he was cast as the hero in TOUCH OF EVIL. He asked who was going to direct, and the producers said they didn’t know yet, but Orson Welles was playing the villain. Heston, an obvious master of understatement, Â said “You know, Orson Welles is a pretty good director.” So they hired Welles to direct and TOUCH OF EVIL turned out to be one of his masterpieces. And Heston was delighted to work with him, seeing a genius in Welles that the rest of Hollywood had ignored for years.
Now that, my friends, is a movie star.
