Welcome! The lobby of the Deranged L.A. Crimes theater is open! Grab a bucket of popcorn, some Milk Duds and a Coke and find a seat. Tonight’s feature is DARK CITY [1950] directed by Hal Wallis and starring Charlton Heston and Lizabeth Scott.
Enjoy the movie!
TCM says:
Danny Haley’s bookie operation is shut down, so he and his pals need money; when Danny meets Arthur Winant, a sucker from out of town, he decoys him into a series of poker games where eventually Winant loses $5000 that isn’t his…then hangs himself. But it seems Winant had a shadowy, protective elder brother who believes in personal revenge. And each of the card players in turn feels a faceless doom inexorably closing in. Dark streets and sexy torch-singer Fran lend ambience.
May 1999| In the wake of the Columbine shootings, Congress holds heated gun-control debates. Then-Vice President Al Gore cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to require background checks for firearms purchases at gun shows and to include safety devices, notably trigger locks, for new guns that are sold. The measure stalls in the House after a series of compromises left people on both sides of the issue disappointed.April 20, 1999 | Students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attack Columbine High School near Denver, killing 12 fellow students and a teacher. Another 24 people are wounded. The attackers then kill themselves. The massacre touches off renewed debate over U.S. gun-control laws.
October 2002 | Ten people are killed and three are wounded in sniper-style attacks in the Washington, D.C., metro region. John Muhammad and teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, were later convicted.
April 27, 2003 | Charlton Heston makes his last appearance as the president of the National Rifle Association, raising a rifle over his head and delivering his trademark line, “From my cold, dead hands.”
June 2003 | A UCLA study published in Injury Prevention, a peer-reviewed academic journal, shows that more than half of firearms dealers questioned in an undercover survey would allow buyers to illegally purchase a firearm on behalf of someone else.
March 2004 | Senators hoping to shield the firearms industry from lawsuits abruptly kill their own bill after it was amended to renew an expiring ban on assault weapons and to require background checks for gun show purchases.
July 2004 | A Justice Department report shows more than 7,000 instances in 2002 and 2003 in which a person prohibited from buying a firearm under federal law was able to do so. It also found that less than 1 percent of the 120,000 people who tried to unlawfully purchase a gun in that timeframe were prosecuted.
Sept. 13, 2004 | Congress allows a 10-year ban on the sale of 19 types of military-style assault weapons to expire. President Bill Clinton signed the bill in 1994, which directed that the ban expire unless Congress reauthorized it.
December 2004 | Congress eliminates direct funding for President George W. Bush’s gun prosecution program, Project Safe Neighborhoods. Related anti-gun programs retained their funding.
December 2004 | The National Academy of Sciences releases a report declaring that accurate research on methods of reducing gun violence is impossible due to a lack of information on firearm ownership and by scholars’ inability to access information such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ data on guns linked to crimes.
December 2004 | Massachusetts becomes the first state to implement an electronic instant-check system with fingerprint scanning for gun licenses and gun purchases. The system provides instant information on outstanding warrants, restraining orders and convictions, and links fingerprint scanners and computers at gun stores and police departments.
January 2005 | California becomes the first state to ban the manufacture, sale, distribution or import of the powerful .50-caliber BMG, or Browning machine gun rifle. Gun control advocates say it could be used by terrorists for assassinations or to drop an airliner.
March 12, 2005 | Terry Ratzmann, a computer technician, opens fire during a sermon in a Wisconsin church , killing seven and wounding four before killing himself.
October 2005 | After it clears Congress, President Bush signs the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which limits the ability of gun crime victims to sue firearms manufacturers and dealers for damages. The bill passed after an amendment was added to require new guns to include trigger locks.
April 2007 | A judge rules that depositions by the parents of the Columbine gunmen would remain sealed until 2027.
April 16, 2007 | After passing a background check even though a Virginia court had deemed him mentally defective, Seung Hui Cho opens fire on the Virginia Tech campus with two handguns he purchased, killing 32 and wounding 24 others. Eighteen months later, Virginia sees a 60 percent jump in concealed gun permit applications.
November 2007 | With renewed interest in preventing people who are mentally ill from purchasing guns, the Justice Department reports that the FBI’s Mental Defective File, which lists people prohibited from buying guns, has ballooned from 175,000 names in June to nearly 400,000.
Jan. 8, 2008 | President Bush signs a rare piece of bipartisan gun-control legislation aimed at keeping people who are severely mentally ill from purchasing guns. The original legislation was introduced in 2002 by New York Democrats Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy after a church shooting, but it did not gain the support to pass until the Virginia Tech shootings.
June 26, 2008 | The U.S. Supreme Court rules in the closely watched District of Columbia v. Heller case that the Second Amendment affirms an individual’s right to bear arms. It also overturned the District’s 32-year ban on handguns.
September 2008 | A Pennsylvania state court rules that Philadelphia was not entitled to set its own gun laws, invalidating five gun-control measures passed by the City Council.
October 2008 | Despite Americans cutting back on large purchases amid the economic downturn, firearms and ammunition sales are up 8 to 10 percent compared to the same period in 2007.
March 10, 2009 | A gunman in Alabama kills nine people including some family members before taking his own life.
March 19, 2009 | A federal judge blocks a last-minute rule enacted by President Bush that allowed visitors to national parks to carry concealed weapons.
April 3, 2009 | Jiverly Wong, a 41-year-old Vietnamese immigrant, shoots 13 people at an immigration services center in Binghamton, N.Y., before killing himself.
Sources: The Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg
Once again, Stuart Caesar tries to appear reasonable and once again, he fails abysmally.
In
the past, Mr. Caesar has shown precious little understanding of
political and economic theories like socialism and communism, so
discovering he was equally misinformed about capitalism is not a
surprise.
But, in criticizing Fatimah Ali's critique of Glenn
Beck's dissing of Martin Luther King Jr. and his 1963 "I Have a Dream"
speech, he makes the bizarre and unrelated point that Charlton Heston
(Oscar-winning actor, gun-rights activist and archconservative) was in
Washington in 1963 at the same rally.
Not
to downplay that, but with an estimated crowd of 250,000, lots of
people were in D.C. that day. The Hollywood contingent alone included
Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte
and many others.
As a big fan of Heston, Mr. Caesar should know
that Heston was a complex man and far more interesting than the
"sound-bite" style of contemporary conservative politics.
Early on, Heston was quite liberal, supporting Adlai Stevenson and JFK for president and actively protesting the Vietnam War.
After
JFK's assassination, Heston, along with many other Hollywood actors,
called for much stricter gun control. (Yeah, that Charlton Heston!)
But,
like many people of his generation, as he aged, Heston's political
views changed, and he ultimately became a Republican and supported
Ronald Reagan and Poppa George Bush. His views on gun control also
hardened, and he became a big supporter of the National Rifle
Association.
And all of this was his right, but it certainly wasn't where his politics were at in 1963 during the March on Washington!
Heston,
the man and the great American actor, deserves to have the complexities
of his political thoughts considered fairly and fully.
Charlton Heston,
who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is
remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses,
Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly
Hills, Calif. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who did not specify a cause. In
August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had received a diagnosis of
neurological symptoms “consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.”
“I’m neither giving up nor giving in,” he said.
Every
actor dreams of a breakthrough role, the part that stamps him in the
public memory, and Mr. Heston’s life changed forever when he caught the
eye of the director Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille, who was planning his next
biblical spectacular, “The Ten Commandments,” looked at the young, physically imposing Mr. Heston and saw his Moses.
When
the film was released, in 1956, more than three and a half hours long
and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a
marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness,
parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets
from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.
Charlton Heston had been
suffering from Alzheimer’s.Credit
Wyatt Counts
Writing
in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was
re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it “a gaudy,
grandiloquent Hollywood classic” and suggested there was more than a
touch of “the rugged American frontiersman of myth” in Mr. Heston’s
Moses.
The
same quality made Mr. Heston an effective spokesman, off screen, for
the causes he believed in. Late in life he became a staunch opponent of
gun control. Elected president of the National Rifle Association
in 1998, he proved to be a powerful campaigner against what he saw as
the government’s attempt to infringe on a constitutional guarantee — the
right to bear arms.
In
Mr. Heston, the N.R.A. found its embodiment of pioneer values — pride,
independence and valor. In a speech at the N.R.A.’s annual convention in
2000, he brought the audience to its feet with a ringing attack on
gun-control advocates. Paraphrasing an N.R.A. bumper sticker (“I’ll give
you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands”), he waved a
replica of a colonial musket above his head and shouted defiantly, “From
my cold, dead hands!”
Mr.
Heston’s screen presence was so commanding that he was never dominated
by mammoth sets, spectacular effects or throngs of spear-waving extras.
In his films, whether playing Buffalo Bill, an airline pilot, a naval
captain or the commander of a spaceship, he essentially projected the
same image — muscular, steely-eyed, courageous. If critics used terms
like “marble-monumental” or “granitic” to describe his acting style,
they just as often praised his forthright, no-nonsense
characterizations.
After
his success in “The Ten Commandments,” Mr. Heston tried a change of
pace. Working for another legendary Hollywood director, Orson Welles, he
played a Mexican narcotics investigator in the thriller “Touch of Evil,”
in which Welles himself played a murderous police captain in a border
town. Also starring Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, the film, a modest
success when it opened in 1958, came to be accepted as a noir classic.
A Biblical Specialty
But
the following year Mr. Heston stepped back into the world of the
biblical epic, this time for the director William Wyler. The movie was “Ben-Hur.”
Cast as a prince in ancient Judea who rebels against the rule of Rome,
Mr. Heston again dominated the screen. In the film’s most spectacular
sequence, he and his co-star, Stephen Boyd, as his Roman rival, fight a
thrilling duel with whips as their horse-drawn chariots career
wheel-to-wheel around an arena filled with roaring spectators.
“Ben-Hur”
won 11 Academy Awards — a record at the time — including those for best
picture, best director and, for Mr. Heston, best actor.
He went on to star opposite Sophia Loren in the 1961 film “El Cid,”
battling the Moors in medieval Spain. As a Marine officer at the
Forbidden City in 1900, he helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in
Nicholas Ray’s 1963 epic “55 Days at Peking.” In “Khartoum”
(1966), he played Gen. Charles (Chinese) Gordon, who was killed in a
desert uprising, led in the film by Laurence Olivier’s Mahdi. When
George Stevens produced and directed “The Greatest Story Ever Told” in 1965, there was Mr. Heston, back in ancient Judea, playing John the Baptist to Max von Sydow’s Jesus.
He portrayed Andrew Jackson twice, in “The President’s Lady” (1953) and “The Buccaneer” (1958). There were westerns (“Major Dundee,” “Will Penny,” “The Mountain Men”), costume dramas (“The Three Musketeers” and its sequel, “The Four Musketeers,”
with Mr. Heston as the crafty Cardinal Richelieu in both) and action
films aplenty. Whether playing a hard-bitten landowner in an adaptation
of James Michener’s novel “The Hawaiians” (1970), or a daring pilot in “Airport 1975,” he could be relied on to give moviegoers their money’s worth.
Charlton Heston posed with his Oscar statuette after winning the 1959 Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of Ben-Hur.Credit
Associated Press
In 1965 he was cast as Michelangelo in the film version of Irving Stone’s novel “The Agony and the Ecstasy.”
Directed by Carol Reed, the film pitted Mr. Heston’s temperamental
artist against Rex Harrison’s testy Pope Julius II, who commissioned
Michelangelo to create frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Mr. Heston’s performance took a critical drubbing, but to audiences, the
larger-than-life role seemed to be another perfect fit. Mr. Heston once
joked: “I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses.
If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does.”
Foray Into the Future
Mr. Heston was catapulted into the distant future in the 1968 science-fiction film “Planet of the Apes,”
in which he played an astronaut marooned on a desolate planet and then
enslaved by its rulers, a race of anthropomorphic apes. The film was a
hit. He reprised the role two years later in the sequel, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”
It
was all a long way from Evanston, Ill., where John Charles Carter was
born on Oct. 4, 1923, and from the small town of St. Helen, Mich., where
his family moved when he was a small boy and where his father ran a
lumber mill. He attended a one-room school and learned to fish and hunt
and to savor the feeling of being self-reliant in the wild, where his
shyness was no handicap.
When
his parents divorced in the 1930s and his mother remarried — his
stepfather’s surname was Heston — the family moved back to the Chicago
suburbs, this time Winnetka. He joined the theater program at his new
high school and went on to enroll at Northwestern University on a
scholarship. By that time, he was convinced he had found his life’s
work.
Mr.
Heston also found a fellow drama student, Lydia Clarke, whom he married
in 1944, after spending two years in the Aleutian Islands as a
radio-gunner with the Army Air Forces. After his discharge, the Hestons
moved to New York, failed to find work in the theater and, somewhat
disenchanted but still determined, moved to North Carolina, where they
spent less than a year working at the Thomas Wolfe memorial theater in
Asheville.
When
they returned to New York in 1947, Mr. Heston got his first big break,
landing the role of Caesar’s lieutenant in a Broadway production of
Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”
staged by Guthrie McClintick and starring Katharine Cornell. The
production ran for seven months and proved to be the high point of Mr.
Heston’s New York stage career. He appeared in a handful of other plays,
most of them dismal failures.
If Broadway had little to offer him, television was another matter. He made frequent appearances in dramatic series like “Robert Montgomery Presents”
and “Philco Playhouse.” The door to Hollywood opened when the film
producer Hal B. Wallis saw Mr. Heston’s performance as Rochester in a
“Studio One” production of “Jane Eyre.” Wallis offered him a contract.
Mr. Heston made his film debut in 1950 in Wallis’s “Dark City,”
a low-grade thriller in which he played a small-time gambler. Two years
later, he did his first work for DeMille as a hard-driving circus boss
in “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
Throughout
his career he studied long and hard for his roles. He prepared for the
part of Moses by memorizing passages from the Old Testament. When
filming began on the sun-baked slopes of Mount Sinai, he suggested to
DeMille that he play the role barefoot — a decision that he felt lent an
edge of truth to his performance.
Charlton Heston as Moses in "The Ten Commandments."Credit
American Movie Classics, via Associated Press
Preparing
for “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” he read hundreds of Michelangelo’s
letters and practiced how to sculpt and paint convincingly. When filming
“The Wreck of the Mary Deare”
(1959), in which he played the pilot of a salvage boat, he learned
deep-water diving. And he mostly rejected stunt doubles. In “Ben-Hur,”
he said, he drove his own chariot for “about 80 percent of the race.”
“I worked six weeks learning how to manage the four white horses,” he said. “Nearly pulled my arms right out of their sockets.”
As
the years wore on, the leading roles began to go to younger men, and by
the 1980s, Mr. Heston’s appearances on screen were less frequent. He
turned to stage work again, not on Broadway but in Los Angeles, at the
Ahmanson Theater, where he played roles ranging from Macbeth to James
Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” He also returned to television, appearing in 1983 as a paternalistic banker in the mini-series “Chiefs” and as an oil baron in the series “The Colbys.”
Mr.
Heston was always able to channel some energies into the public arena.
He was an active supporter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
calling him “a 20th-century Moses for his people,” and participated in
the historic march on Washington in 1963.
Inspired by Reagan
He
served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1966 to 1971,
following in the footsteps of his friend and role model Ronald Reagan. A
registered Democrat for many years, he was nevertheless selective in
the candidates he chose to support and often campaigned for
conservatives.
In
1981, President Reagan appointed him co-chairman of the President’s
Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, a group formed to devise ways to
obtain financing for arts organizations. Although he had reservations
about some projects supported by the National Endowment for the Arts,
Mr. Heston wound up defending the agency against charges of elitism.
Again
and again, he proved himself a cogent and effective speaker, but he
rejected suggestions that he run for office. “I’d rather play a senator
than be one,” he said.
He
became a Republican after Democrats in the Senate blocked the
confirmation of Judge Robert Bork, a conservative, to the Supreme Court
in 1987. Mr. Heston had supported the nomination and was critical of the
Reagan White House for misreading the depth of the liberal opposition.
Mr.
Heston frequently spoke out against what he saw as evidence of the
decline and debasement of American culture. In 1992, appalled by the
lyrics on “Cop Killer,”
a recording by the rap artist Ice T, he blasted the album at a Time
Warner stockholders meeting and was a force in having it withdrawn from
the marketplace.
Mr. Heston as Ben-Hur in 1958.Credit
Associated Press
In
the 1996 elections, he campaigned on behalf of some 50 Republican
candidates and began to speak out against gun control. In 1997, he was
elected vice president of the N.R.A.
In
December of that year, as the keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary
gala of the Free Congress Foundation, Mr. Heston described “a cultural
war” raging across America, “storming our values, assaulting our
freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we
believe.”
A Relentless Drive
The
next year, in his 70’s, he was elected president of the N.R.A. In his
speech at the association’s convention before his election, he trained
his oratorical artillery on President Bill Clinton: “Mr.
Clinton, sir,
America didn’t trust you with our health care system. America didn’t
trust you with gays in the military. America doesn’t trust you with our
21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our
guns.”
He
was in the news again after the shootings at Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colo., in April 1999, when he said that the N.R.A.’s annual
membership meeting, scheduled to be held the following week in Denver,
would be scaled back in light of the killings but not canceled.
In a memorable scene from “Bowling for Columbine,”
a 2002 documentary about violence in America, the director, Michael
Moore, visited Mr. Heston at his home and asked him how he could defend
his pro-gun stance. Mr. Heston ended the interview without comment.
In
May 2001, he was unanimously re-elected to an unprecedented fourth term
by the association’s board of directors. The association had amended
its bylaws in 2000 to allow Mr. Heston to serve a third one-year term as
president. Two months after his celebrated speech at the 2000
convention, it was disclosed that he had checked himself into an alcohol
rehabilitation program.
Mr.
Heston was proud of his collection of some 30 guns at his longtime home
in the Coldwater Canyon area of Los Angeles, where he and his wife
raised their son, Fraser, and daughter, Holly Ann. They all survive him,
along with three grandchildren.
Never
much for socializing , he spent his days either working, exercising,
reading (he was fond of biographies) or sketching. An active diarist, he
published several accounts of his career, including “The Actor’s Life:
Journals 1956-1976.”
In
2003, Mr. Heston was among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of
Freedom awarded by President Bush. In 1997, he was also a recipient of
the annual Kennedy Center honors.
Mr.
Heston continued working through the 1990s, acting more frequently on
television but also in occasional films. His most recent film appearance
found him playing a cameo role, in simian makeup, in Tim Burton’s 2001
remake of “Planet of the Apes.”
He
announced in 1999 that he was receiving radiation treatments for
prostate cancer, but said he would continue his film work and go on
making appearances on behalf of Republicans running for office.
He
had always hated the thought of retirement and once explained his
relentless drive as an actor. “You never get it right,” he said in a
1986 interview. “Never once was it the way I imagined it lying awake at 4
o’clock in the morning thinking about it the next day.” His goal
remained, he said, “to get it right one time.”
Correction: April 7, 2008
A front-page obituary and a headline in some editions on Sunday
about the actor Charlton Heston misstated his age and the year of his
birth. He was 84, not 83, and was born in 1923, not 1924.
Correction: April 9, 2008
An obituary in some editions on Sunday and in some copies on
Monday about the actor Charlton Heston misstated his given name at
birth. It was John Charles Carter, not Charlton Carter. The obituary
also referred incorrectly to the character played by Orson Welles in the
film “Touch of Evil,” in which Mr. Heston had a starring role. The
character, Quinlan, is a police captain, not a sheriff. And a list of
Mr. Heston’s films accompanying the obituary on Monday misstated the
relationship between two characters in the film “Midway,” in which Mr.
Heston played a Naval officer. The characters, the officer’s son and a
woman of Japanese descent, are hoping to marry; they are not already
married.
Correction: April 22, 2008
An obituary on April 7 and in some copies on April 6 about the
actor Charlton Heston misstated the year he enlisted in the Army Air
Forces, as well as other aspects of his life. He enlisted in 1942, not
1944. He served in the Aleutian Islands about two years, not three. And
he and his wife, the former Lydia Clarke, an actress, spent less than
one year, not several seasons, at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Theater in
Asheville, N.C., which they founded after the war.
