Charlton Heston: An Appreciation

Can you believe what a major prick I am? I love this guy’s work, but my first thought when I read tonight that he passed away at 83 was “Mr. DeMille, Charlton Heston is ready to have his gun pried from his cold, dead fingers.”

And my second thought was that I’m still pissed at Michael Moore that my last filmed memory of this titan of 20th century cinema is that of a sick, frail old man hobbling away to escape from a predatory documentarian’s camera. Shame on you, Michael Moore. You had me ‘till Heston.

In the end, my feelings about Charlton Heston aren’t even a mixed bag. I take my hat off to the man. It wasn’t just that he effortlessly measured up to the larger-than-life characters he played, it’s that if Chuck Heston was in a movie, that was gonna be a movie worth seeing. Take a look at his page on imdb.com, every movie he was in, even if it was crap science fiction from the ’70s (“Planet of the Apes,” “Soylent Green,” “Earthquake,” etc.) it was always an exciting yarn. He had a sense of story that was damned near impeccable. To this day, a giddy chill runs through me every time I stumble across a Charlton Heston film I haven’t seen before. “El Cid” just made it out onto DVD for the first time a couple weeks ago – I was in line on day one. Not the Great Movie it’s made out to be (Sophia Loren mopes through its entire length, large empty eyes and stilted line readings torpedoing every scene she’s in – I loved learning in the ‘extras’ that Heston hated working with her as much as I hate watching her work), but Heston carries every scene he’s in, usually on his broad, naked, sweaty back. Never has unintentional homo-eroticism garnered more mainstream approval than in the films of Charlton Heston!

He played Men’s Men from Julius Caesar to 'Buffalo Bill' Cody to Moses to Andrew Jackson twice (once as president in 1953’s “The President’s Lady” and once as general in 1958’s “The Buccaneer”), Thomas Jefferson, John The Baptist, Henry VIII, Abe Lincoln, Michelangelo (a whole different kind of man’s man to whom Heston lent his trademark Alpha Male moxy anyhow) to my personal favorite, loveable slave trader Whipple 'Whip' Hoxworth in 1970’s “The Hawaiians.”

Did he make a lot of bad movies? Oh God yes. Was he great in all of them? You bet your ass. He would chew no piece of scenery before its time. I’d watch any one of his flicks again at the drop of a hat. And chances are, I’ll have my opportunity in the next few days as Turner Classic Movies will undoubtedly run a marathon of the films they have in their vaults featuring him.

The only flick I caught him in that I didn’t make it through was “Khartoum,” and that was because he didn’t enter until 45 minutes into this U.K. snoozer, after it was already long-since rendered DOA by almost an hour’s worth of aloof British stand-offishness. One thing Heston never was, was stand-offish. He sank his teeth into every role like Ted Nugent devouring a fresh, hot kill. He was shameless, egotistical, brazen. He had to be to play the characters he played.

And yes, he was a fire-breathing right-winger. So fucking what? The artist’s judgment was beyond reproach, the man’s decisions, well, they were open to more broadly-ranging interpretations. I was always able to separate the two, the same way I never held Jimmy Stewart’s way-right-of-center politics against him. Sometimes, you just have to check your ideology at the door.

What an amazing body of work. What a great, gleaming Hollywood god. When they made Heston, they threw away the mold, man. We’ll not see his like again.

I for one mourn his passing, and can’t wait till The Man Cub is old enough for me to share this extraordinary screen icon’s unparalleled filmography with him. As the man himself summed up his career, “I've played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses — and that's probably enough for any man.”