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.
One day more than 35 years ago, I pulled into the parking lot of the massive Del Coronado hotel in San Diego when an equally massive figure walked in front of my car, blocking my view because his body filled the entire windshield. It was Charlton Heston, and he strode toward the tennis courts with a purposive authority that brought to mind Moses and Ben Hur, albeit dressed this time in shorts. This was the closest I ever got to Heston in the flesh, although, like hundred of millions of other moviegoers, I saw a great deal of him, sometimes barely clothed (“Planet of the Apes”), on the big screen.
“Big” is an appropriate word. Heston was physically imposing and he was a big movie star, someone who for several decades was the very definition of the phrase “leading man.” With his passing on April 5th, and the passing of Richard Widmark 10 days earlier , there are no leading men of a certain kind left, even as living mementos of a bygone era. John Wayne, Anthony Quinn, Rock Hudson, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, William Holden, Jimmy Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Glenn Ford, Gregory Peck. They’re all gone; the only ones still alive are Clint Eastwood, who now sits behind the camera most of the time, and Kirk Douglas, in his 90s and slowed down by a stroke.
What all these fallen stars (with the exception of Widmark) shared was a physicality that radiated energy and demanded attention. They were “compelling screen presences,” in part because they literally filled the screen, just as Heston filled the smaller screen of my windshield. (Lancaster often acted with his back to the camera; power emanated from it; his back was the expressive counterpart of Douglas’s chest, which was bared in almost every movie he made.) It was no accident that all these guys were identified (some more than others) with the western, a genre that foregrounds the glories and trials of masculinity as they are captured in a line from Louis L’Amour’s “Heller With a Gun” (1955): “It was a hard land and it bred hard men to hard ways.”
But Heston wasn’t hard (many have testified to how genuinely nice he was), and it showed in his best performances. The fact is that Heston’s size, his monumentality, was an obstacle he had to overcome in order to become the actor he wanted to be. When you saw him it was all too easy to agree with Pauline Kael’s summary assessment: “With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a god-like hero; built for strength, he is an archetype of what makes Americans win.” Mike LaSalle, film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, remarked just after the star’s death, “By size, disposition and worldview, Heston was incapable of playing a small man.”
But that’s not right. Not only was Heston capable of playing a small man; the tension between the inner smallness he was portraying and his physical mass added strength and poignancy to the performance. A good example is the 1958 movie “The Big Country,” a powerful western directed by William Wyler (who would direct Heston in “Ben Hur” the next year and who was the director of the best American movie ever made, “The Best Years of our Lives”).
“The Big Country” is a really big movie in every way — scope, landscape, music, performances and bodies. Heston’s co-actors include Gregory Peck, Charles Bickford, Chuck Connors and Burl Ives, each a large man exuding power. In this company, Heston is at best the sixth lead (although he got fourth billing), behind Peck, Bickford, Ives and the two female stars, Carroll Baker and Jean Simmons. The key to his role is that he is not his own man. His character is in love with his boss’s daughter (Baker) and he hopes that his loyal service to “the Major” (Bickford) will someday be rewarded by a piece of the ranch. These aspirations are upset by the arrival of Peck as the daughter’s successful suitor. A retired sea-captain entirely out of water, the Peck character nevertheless navigates quite confidently in his new surroundings. Even when he makes mistakes, and he makes more than a few, he always displays an inner ease in contrast to Heston’s Leech, who is anxious, ambitious, jealous and frustrated.
The plot gives Leech an opportunity to redeem himself, or rather to be himself, and he almost takes it but doesn’t. The Major is about to storm the ranch house of his hated rival, played by Ives (they are feuding over a water source called, what else, the Big Muddy), and set off a battle that can only end with the death of almost everyone. Leech sees the folly of the enterprise, and tells the Major that for the first time he cannot stand with him. But when the Major starts out on his own, Leech simply cannot abandon him, and he joins him riding down the canyon to the rousing cadences of one of the best movie scores ever written. In a more conventional western, this would have come across as an act of heroism (going down with your friend despite the odds), but “The Big Country” is an attack on the code of the West, and Leech here displays his inability to break free of it. Heston is magnificent in his willingness to be small, a man of great outward strength who cannot summon the inner strength to break free of his subservience to another. (It is a tribute to his performance that Bosley Crowther’s review in this newspaper barely mentioned him.)
What “The Big Country” demonstrates is that Heston was really a character actor in a leading man’s body, and that his basic character was not Moses or Ben Hur or El Cid but the weak and flawed inhabitant of a physical frame he could not live up to. In some of his finest films, he plays that role even when he is the leading man. “Will Penny” (Heston’s favorite among his own movies) is the best example. He plays the title character, an illiterate, limited cow hand who just tries to hang on over the winter, and has no future. A future opens up to him in the form a woman and her son, but (like Leech) he can’t take it because he knows that he’s not up to it, or to much of anything else. In the end he rides away, not in the splendid isolation that marks the exit of the classic western hero who has cleaned up the town or saved the valley, but just in isolation. A reviewer at Reel.com draws the right moral: “Heston so often required to play larger than life characters delivers a sublime performance in a role that is the exact opposite.”
He does it again in “Soylent Green” (1973), a film graced by the great Edward G. Robinson’s final performance as on old man ready to die. (Robinson died nine days after the film was completed.)
The time is a future in which overpopulation and environmental disaster have led to a dystopia ruled over by the mysterious Soylent Corporation, which distributes a food source of questionable origin. Heston plays Thorn, a police detective investigating the death of a member of the board with the help of researcher Sol Roth (Robinson). He is bitter, venal, exploitative and thoroughly unattractive, but as he pursues his investigation despite the attempts of his superiors to close it down, he grows into someone who is ready to risk his life in order to bear witness to the terrible truth of a society that is literally eating itself (“Soylent green is people”). Thorn is a reluctant protagonist, again a small man in a body too big for him. Reviewer Tamara Hladick, writing for Scifi.com, calls him a “dubious, ambiguous hero” and names Robinson’s Roth, a big man in a small body, the film’s “conscience and soul.”
The conscience (in a weird sense) and soul of “Touch of Evil” is Orson Welles’s Hank Quinlan, a very big man in a very big body whose zeal for justice had led him to acts of corruption including murder. Heston plays Mike Vargas, a Mexican policeman no less self-righteous than Quinlan, but much less effective. He runs around a lot and manages to place his sexy new wife (Janet Leigh) in danger while repeatedly misreading the situation he has gotten himself into. In the end, Quinlan dies because his trusted assistant tricks him into a confession, an act not of betrayal but (he explains) of fidelity to the lessons his mentor has taught him. Vargas is technically victorious; he brings down the bad guy and gets to ride out of town with Janet Leigh; but the camera lingers on the fallen bulk of Quinlan who, even in death, receives a famous tribute from Marlene Dietrich: “He was some kind of man.” Vargas may be a man some day, but not in this movie. He just looks the part. Quinlan, barely able to move and spectacularly unattractive, is the real thing. Once again, Heston uses his movie-star profile and body as foils to set off something more substantial. It is a performance of great generosity as he yields the spotlight to the actor/director he so much admired.
It was a generosity he displayed off-screen as well as on. He supported Welles in his battles against the studio as he would later support Sam Peckinpah, to the extent of forfeiting his salary when the famously erratic director’s funding was cut off because of cost overruns incurred in the filming of “Major Dundee” (1965). He stood and marched with Martin Luther King. He lobbied for the National Endowment for the Arts despite disliking some of the projects it funded. He served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild and was chairman of the American Film Institute. He was active in politics, first as a liberal democrat, before following his friend Ronald Reagan down the path of conservatism. Again like Reagan, he announced to the public that he was suffering form what appeared to be an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease, ending his announcement with these famous lines from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: “We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep.” When he went to his final sleep, his wife of 64 years was by his bedside.
And, oh yes, he was a passionate (some said fanatic) advocate of gun rights and the president of the National Rifle Association. Many on the other side of this controversy were unable to forgive him for what they considered a moral as well as a political failing, and they vilified both the man and the career. They were wrong to do so. He was some kind of man.
In the beginning, there was the jaw, and the jaw was tight. It was a chiseled jaw in the marble landscape of a face, and the mouth was not the kind for kissing, but for barking commandments in the clearest possible diction, each word given its own space and time, and woe be unto those unbelievers who would worship the golden calf when he came down from the mountain and laid down the law of the land.
Because Moses was not a man -- or Charlton Heston an actor -- to mumble his lines. Or to monkey with.
In the mind's eye, the iconic roles of Heston's career were figures of absolute authority: Ben-Hur and El Cid, Charles Gordon of Khartoum, Moses and Capt. Taylor marooned on a planet populated by talking apes. Bigger-than-life men, men of intestinal fortitude, tested by the fates, standing ramrod-straight, leading with their jaw, entering the arena to do battle, no quarter asked or given.
Also, Heston became famous -- or infamous -- for his politics, particularly his role in later years as the front man for the National Rifle Association and his belief that the Bill of Rights is built upon the bedrock of the Second Amendment. You would take away Chuck Heston's right to bear arms at your own peril.
And so these may be reasonable images to pass through the mind as one ascends Coldwater Canyon to visit Heston at his hilltop lair, which he calls, simply, the Ridge. He holds the high ground.
One is aware that in his 1995 autobiography, "In the Arena," Heston offered his thoughts on the importance of well-defended perimeter.
"Most people in the film community are unfamiliar with firearms and many oppose them, some quite virulently," Heston wrote. "During the L.A. riots in 1992, a good many of these folk suffered a change of heart. As smoke from burning buildings smudged the skyline and the TV news showed vivid images of laughing looters smashing windows and carting off boomboxes and booze, I got a few phone calls from firmly anti-gun friends in clear conflict. 'Umm, Chuck, you have quite a few . . . ah, guns, don't you?'
" 'Yes, I do.'
" 'Shotguns and . . . like that?'
" 'Indeed.'
" 'Could you lend me one for a day or so? I tried to buy one, but they have this waiting period . . . ' "
This waiting period, indeed.
Heston concludes the lesson with the warning to looters eyeing his boomboxes and booze. "Our only neighbors on our ridge are the Isaacs. Between us, Billy and I must own at least 40 firearms of various types. We would resist with deadly force any assault on our homes or those who live in them."
Because Charlton Heston holds the high ground.
And so on a warm, sunny morning, as the visitor pulls into the drive, a figure appears behind the window and watches. It is Heston himself. He steps out, extends a handshake of medium-strength grip and leads the way inside. The jaw is still there and the eyes are bright and clear. For Heston is now 74 years old and has recently had hip surgery, the bane of the aged, and so moves stiffly into the living room, wearing nylon sweat pants that make a shushing sound, and on his feet are thick white socks and a pair of cheap black Chinese slippers, and he is shuffling. Time passes for all, and Chuck Heston's days of chariot racing are behind him.
"I have played formidable authority figures," he begins, his voice still bass, still resonating with an oaken-cask profundo. "Characters not easy to get along with. Kings and warriors and cowboys and cops and astronauts, and, of course, Moses. None of these men you want to cross."
Indeed. A few years ago, Heston returned to the screen in a cameo role for director James Cameron in Arnold Schwarzenegger's "True Lies," in which Heston played, complete with a pirate's eye patch, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He explains: "Cameron said that I was the only actor who could plausibly intimidate Arnold." He knows that he has that power, and the trademark of grit appears to please him. It has clearly provided him with his life's work.
"It is my physical equipment," he says. "I was once asked why there weren't as many tall actors today and I have to say that stumped me. There aren't."
Heston had the height and jawbone, and the voice that is almost as recognizable as a signature. Throughout his career, Heston has done Shakespeare "because that is what I believe actors should do." It shows in his acting.
While other actors, in his time and later, pursued a more naturalistic style of acting, Heston's work is classical and theatrical -- and physical. He says it is a matter of pride that he learned to fight with broadswords, and ride horses and camels, and to race a chariot, as he did in "Ben-Hur," probably his most memorable role next to Moses.
Modern audiences today who rent his long-running videos on rainy weekends might find his acting in the epics a bit stiff and dated, but oddly comforting. In a contemporary culture, riven by crosscurrents fuzzing the lines of good and evil, Charlton Heston is the crossing guard.
In interviews and his autobiography, Heston is generous about the work of others and humble about his own. "I have done some great scenes," he says. "I have had some great parts. There was some good work and some not-so-good work, there were failed films and a few fine ones. As for my work, I will leave that to others."
He is, though, unhappy about certain trends in modern cinema and American life. "There are fewer giant figures today," he says. "The excitement in the movies is largely digital. There is nothing much really to act. The actors could be replaced by holograms, could become special effects themselves."
As Heston reclines on a couch in his living room, his fingers fidget with his shirt buttons and tug at the upholstery piping, distracted.
"I am not Moses," he says at one point. But how to reconcile the man and the actor?
Most of his early boyhood, until the age of 10, was spent in the Michigan woods. In his autobiography, Heston writes of hunting and helping put meat in the stew pot. But he admits it was only a few rabbits, at most, and that he spent more time in the forest around his home, pretending to be other people, Huck Finn or Davy Crockett.
His parents were divorced when he was young -- a traumatic event, and a shame to him that he never spoke of at the time. He and his mother moved about until she remarried and the family moved to Wilmette, a Chicago North Shore suburb. In high school, he was not skilled enough to play team sports, so he joined the rifle team and the chess club, but dropped them when he discovered a love of the stage.
It was Drama Club for young Chuck. He was a shy boy and he says the shyness has been with him for a lifetime. He was never adopted by his mother's second husband, Chet Heston, but he took his name. "It is possible," he writes, "that I'm a loner because I'm an actor. An actor at work is giving you somebody else. He's not performing to you; you're watching him be another man. In my case, it's often a real historical figure, a far better man than I am myself."
The Winnetka Community Theater awarded him a scholarship to Northwestern University to study acting, but his training was interrupted by World War II. He joined the Navy. He served his time in a lonely outpost in the Aleutian Islands. He did not fire a shot in anger. As he put it: "I attended World War II."
He married his wife, Lydia, also an actor, and their marriage continues more than 50 years later.
Heston's political activities began with leadership of a union, the Screen Actors Guild. He voted Democratic, for Kennedy and Johnson, and, as many of the current critics of his politics may not recall, he was an early supporter of civil rights and marched in Washington, in the full flower of his celebrity after his roles as Moses and Ben-Hur, with Martin Luther King Jr.
But Heston was, even then, turning to the right. He recalls, while filming "War Lord," being driven from location to hotel and passing a large billboard with a portrait of Barry Goldwater and a sea of blue and the words: "In your heart, you know he's right."
"Yeah," Heston says now, talking on the Ridge. "that was Saint Paul on the road to Damascus." An epiphany. The turning of the screw.
"Dear God, what a sorry road we've slid down since then," Heston believes. The slide? In his book, the actor-activist rails.
Oliver Stone "attacking the core elements of society."
Political correctness run amok.
"Affirmative action is a stain on the American soul."
Quentin Tarantino's philosopher-assassins.
Ice-T rapping about cop killing.
And overpopulation of the planet, an issue that forms the central idea of his one "message movie," the 1973 chiller with one of his most memorable lines: "Soylent Green . . . is people."
"Our borders are awash in immigrants," he writes, "a large proportion of them illegal, but all nonetheless qualified for the fruits of our welfare state, entitled to generous benefits, including not only voting in our elections on ballots in the language of their choice, but the education of their progeny in that language."
On another page, he relates, "A columnist described the childhood of a welfare kid with brutal honesty: first felony arrest at fourteen, becomes an absent parent at sixteen, out of school at seventeen if he gets that far, with a diploma he can't read."
A society unraveling? A planet of the apes? The man who played Moses is honestly, deeply concerned. "In a staggering number of Hollywood films of the past 20 years, the villains are authority figures in American society," he says.
Charlton Heston, for his 20 years in the arena, was the authority figure in American epic films. There was right and wrong. Good and evil. Honor and cowardice. Heston died for something in his movies. Moses did not reach the promised land. El Cid died of his wounds, but was propped upon his stallion's back, dead, to lead his men into glorious battle against the invading Moors in Spain.
The world is now more of a muddle.
After an hour or so, it is time to leave the Ridge. The road to his house is being rebuilt, and the workers and their equipment are crowding the front drive, but Heston comes out and waves his arm, directing traffic, bringing order, parting the waves, and then he limps back into the house and, in the rearview mirror, closes the door.
At a ceremony in Hollywood, those who knew him said the star of "Ben Hur" and the original "Planet of the Apes" was unafraid of stirring political controversy.
Charlton Heston, the movie star, political activist and former head of the National Rifle Association, got his own postage stamp on Friday, unveiled at a ceremony at the historic Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
The stamp bearing Heston's image is a painting taken from a photo shot by his widow, Lydia Clarke Heston, who attended Friday's ceremony, which was part of the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood.
The Heston stamp is three years in the making and began with lobbying from Michael Levine, the actor's publicist of 21 years.
Heston is the 18th stamp in the Legends of Hollywood series from the U.S. Postal Service. Earlier ones included John Wayne, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper and Lucille Ball.
The ceremony, which preceded the worldwide premiere of the newly restored 1958 Heston film Touch of Evil, included remarks from representatives of the postal service as well as members of SAG-AFTRA. Heston was president of that organization's precursor, the Screen Actors Guild, from 1965 to 1971.
The speakers, who included son Fraser Clarke Heston, a filmmaker who directed his father in the 1990 TNT movie Treasure Island, noted that Heston's political activism was sometimes controversial.
Several reminisced about Heston picketing against segregation in 1961 and marching with Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963, when it took courage to do so, and remarked about his passionate support of the NRA.
"Heston fundamentally embodied a commitment to fight for what he valued -- no matter where or when he was needed," said Ned Vaughn, the founding executive vp of SAG-AFTRA. "Later in his life, some of those fights would earn him contempt from some of his colleagues in the entertainment industry. Becoming a Republican and giving his unwavering support to the work of his good friend Ronald Reagan. Giving compelling voice to his concerns about political correctness and cultural decline in our society, and, of course, fighting to protect the Second Amendment."
The event, hosted by TCM's Ben Mankiewicz, also included a video montage of Heston's work, with clips from Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments and the original Planet of the Apes.
After the montage, Fraser Clarke Heston told how his dad learned to drive a four-horse chariot for his Oscar-winning role in Ben Hur. When he worried he wasn't good enough to realistically race against several other teams in the arena, stunt director Yakima Canutt told him: "Chuck, you just make sure you stay in the chariot. I guarantee you're gonna win the damn race."
After the event, Levine told The Hollywood Reporter that when he launched his effort to put Heston's image on a stamp at a press conference three years ago, only one prominent person showed up: conservative political commentator Bruce Herschensohn.
"For the first two years, it wasn't easy and it wasn't popular. My sense is because of his work with the NRA," Levine said.
The effort gained steam about a year ago through a public petition and some friendly media, particularly from Christopher Ruddy and his Newsmax magazine, Levine said.
"Heston was an extraordinary guy, not just an extraordinary actor. He was a very unique man," Levine said.
