Picture of Prejudice
The Fox Movie Channel showed “Gentleman’s Agreement” the other night, a preachy drama about anti-Semitism that won the Academy Award 60 years ago, and it brought into focus the realization that I may live to see a black man inaugurated as President of the United States.
What Barack Obama faces from now until November would be unimaginable to the people who made and saw that movie then, including a 23-year-old just back from World War II who had little audacity and even less hope of living in the rich, glossy world it portrayed.
Gregory Peck played a magazine writer who pretends to be Jewish. A decade later, I was an editor on one of those magazines, unknowingly hired by George W. Bush’s grandfather as the first Jew among thousands of employees, working with Laura Z. Hobson, who wrote the novel on which the picture was based.
When it came out, there was an uproar against the director, Elia Kazan, and the producer, Darryl Zanuck, whose names sounded foreign and were presumed to be of Jewish origin. Hobson relished the irony that they weren’t but that she, who was but had married someone with an Anglo-Saxon name, escaped the anger of the offended.
Prejudice is still a nasty, shadowy business that, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, seldom shows its face openly. No one uses phrases like “gentleman’s agreement” or “restricted” these days, but “blue-collar voters” and “Reagan Democrats” serve the same purpose as codes to mask fear and hatred of people who are different.
We haven’t had a Jewish president but, if and when Barack Obama takes the oath of office next January, “Gentleman’s Agreement” will be even more of an anachronism than it is now. But until then, it’s a movie that Hillary Clinton, John McCain and their campaigns might want to think about.
Cross-posted from my blog.
Sexy Beast, I Mean Bing
Bing Crosby’s birthday is May 2, or 3. He was born in 1903, although his tombstone says 1904 because of a mix-up. This confusion about the simplest of a man’s details is the least of the problems with his legacy.
Like the Olympian gods, he is largely forgotten and unloved today. Gary Giddins made a valiant attempt to focus attention on this Mozart of the popular song with his very ample 2001 biography Pocketful of Dreams. And for a brief moment, pop culture glanced at “the first white hip guy born in America” (Artie Shaw). References to him occasionally pop up: two recent are in Ken Levine’s post of Mariah Carey’s topping Elvis for number 1 hits: “If everyone in the United States buys copies of “Rubberneckin’”, “Kiss Me Quick”, and “Old Shep” Elvis Presley can reclaim his rightful crown (of being number three behind the Beatles and Bing Crosby) and order can once again be restored to the universe”; and Kim Morgan did a post on Crosby, citing one of his lesser known films, Sing You Sinners.
But those are the extreme exceptions.
Steed is always teasing that I don’t speak up for Crosby, one of my lifelong passions. And so for his birthday this year, I will.
Fairy Tales: A Narrow Escape*
(unedited - subtitle: Solemnity Does Not A Truth Make)
“Modern art is what you can get away with,” Andy Warhol told us, suggesting ‘artistic’ works get approved not just by the few acting out of sometimes perplexing conviction, but by all those who mindlessly tag along. And in this way the limit of the credible often reaches a breaking point. The same may be said of conventional philosophy and religion, man’s most venerated cerebral and spiritual enterprises. Unchallenged by multitudes thirsting for reverent fantasy and meticulous reassurance, their proponents take themselves as abundantly seriously as contemporary art’s high priests do, but does something represent a truth merely because people no longer question it?
Antonin Artaud said it all when he wrote Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, asking us to stop this nonsense with our imaginary friend. For if man needed to create myths or fairy tales to deal with his own mind and to step out beyond himself so he could look down upon himself and heal himself or give himself that extra bit of courage and strength in the face of mostly cruel and often endless setbacks, then for a time this was fine. But by beginning to believe his own inventions, imposing them as if they were the truth, he created the beginning of his own degradation. Because fable, myth or legend is a series of pretty fibs and an elaborate lie however well meant, however well told, represents the seed of destruction that every grand falsehood carries within itself.
What’s found at the opposite end of the scale is immoderate pride, as for its part formal western thought is built on the completely mistaken contention, its point-de-départ, that if we are not there, seemingly nothing is there. Plus, that while it ought to be philosophy’s function to remove all nonsense from the world, we have never ceased creating it: all that sweet bullshit, those exquisite fictions and tales of ours. And notions like Heidegger’s “sein” or Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, both essentially flawed because when deprived of of our consciousness, our “sein”, we don’t for a moment or necessarily cease to exist. In Descartes’ case the most we could let him get away with: I think, therefore I am what I am (i.e. as opposed to others or animals), and not one hell of a lot more as again even when I’m not sentient, say what you like, but clearly I still am!
When re-reading so many hallowed texts, consider the self-indulgent hokum often meriting some sort of stage direction saying: STOP! Here Mind Disappears Up Rectum! Because, one more time, after close scrutiny nearly all established conventions ultimately point in one single direction—they confirm our pre-eminence and successful continuity in the universe. Man still secretly thinking he’s the measure of all things when nothing is further from the truth. Repeatedly convincing himself there’s some sort of finality to the scheme of things and that finality is him, when most likely there’s not even a scheme. For so called nothingness and the absence of human existence or awareness are not synonymous. Eons simply episodes in which nothingness arising from emptiness is not only a non sequitur but a non plus, though the answer to the question ‘What is is??’ admittedly remains a tempting and elusive one. The body of western thought then having more than anything to do with the mechanics of thinking and formation of action in thought called will. With indexation and the providing of comfort through carefully constructed metaphysical truths no more real than large collections of inane wax figures in a morbid museum staring us in the face. Yet with ultimate intellectual perversion, some brazenly suggesting that we’re not here at all, that everything is an illusion. (Even though, and after the onion soup, a bathroom door regrettably left ajar… would kill this notion pretty swiftly) Anyway, it did and does always come down to the same and unfortunately remains the canard: I know, who else’s, but our take on the world and beyond rules all.
My point then, with ultimate wisdom does there absolutely have to be a ‘take’? For has the foul, this sudden other whiff of reckless certainty and learned self-importance not become… quite unbearable by now?
Contrary to frivolous lore it’s not prostitution, but philosophy that’s our oldest profession, though certainly not as well paid. In classical Greek the word philosophy literally meaning “love of knowledge”, but isn’t it a fact we love knowledge so much that half the time we invented it? Simultaneously mystifying and sanctifying it as time went on? Received wisdom more than anything needing to hang over us because it catered to something deep inside us: our extraordinary vanity, our unquenchable thirst for survival, our need for order, but mostly our dual addiction to certainty and our emotional need to feel wanted? Knowledge manipulated the way a child closes its eyes pretending it’s no longer there, or wants to make believe it lives in a world with which it feels more comfortable?
Hollywood’s Censor
Over at my place we’ve had several lively discussions of the Production Code Administration, so the Siren was eager to read Hollywood’s Censor, Thomas Doherty’s biography of PCA honcho Joseph I. Breen. Doherty is a good writer and the book is intelligent and amusing. He obviously developed a real affection for his subject, and if the Siren in no way came to share that affection it’s no reflection on Doherty. This is, however, a frustrating book. Like a pre-Code film shredded for later release, it’s the things left out that are the most tantalizing.
The author is probably the first to write of Hollywood’s head censor without condescension or smirking, pointing out that Breen genuinely loved movies and saw his role as more of a script advisor than anything else. Contrary to the picture many people have of classic-era Hollywood censors, the PCA’s chief role was to vet scripts, not scissor prints. Most of Breen’s work consisted of horse-trading with the producers and screenwriters, haggling over word choice and suggesting ways to comply with the Code’s various strictures. Those rules enforced a rigidly Catholic sensibility, one with strict views about sin, repentance and redemption. If other faiths countenanced such things as birth control and divorce, the Catholic Church did not, and so for the duration of Breen’s tenure they were virtually unknown in Hollywood movies as well.
Doherty, while giving full measure to Breen as a particularly rigid example of what he calls “Victorian Irish,” also wants to correct the image of the censor as a dimwitted bluenose. As a movie lover, Breen had taste; his letters to Charlie Chaplin when vetting The Great Dictator practically grovel, as Breen apologizes repeatedly for presuming to scissor genius. (But presume he did, as Breen reminded Chaplin that the word “lousy” was forbidden.) One of the few moments when the Siren felt real warmth toward Breen came when she read the glowing praise he sent to Orson Welles after viewing rushes for The Magnificent Ambersons. And while Breen left himself open to mockery, then and later, with his finger-wagging over things like Nick and Nora’s king-sized bed, his chief desire was what a later generation would call “deniability.” If Ernst Lubitsch’s Angel presented a well-appointed “salon” where ladies offered “an amusing time,” that was fine. The audience could see a brothel if they liked–Breen’s chief concern was whether the up-front appearance was clean. The most talented filmmakers learned to smuggle the smut.
Prince Charming, Prince Charming… Ridicule Is Nothing To Be Scared Of
Hello, yeah, it’s been a while…
Since I’ve been distracted by politics over at my place, and because I didn’t want to inflict a simple review of Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay on you (now, a comprehensive analysis of the Stoner Comedy, maybe… but I haven’t had the time), I’ve been a little out of the loop on the arts beat.
But let me try to get back there, by discussing the sorry state of the Romantic Comedy.
Everybody’s got a theory about what’s wrong with the Rom-Com these days (first idea: calling them Rom-Coms), but it probably comes down to the basics: poor scripts, weak direction, and lack of star power. Though another, probably just as useful theory is economics: given the demands of making big money on pictures that open big, it’s hard to invest the smaller, audience building crowd pleaser.
Myself, while I believe in all those business-based observations, I think it’s also about the films themselves, which have skewed a traditional, winning formula beyond recognition; where these films used to be about couples, and the interplay between two individuals, these days, oversimplification (and some darker social trends) have led to a result that’s killing romance on film: the overarching need to snag a hot guy.
Can’t Stop Joe Jackson
It was quite unexpected when my brother walked into rehearsal one night way back in 1979 and announced that “Steve Miller” had a new record out that blew him away. He told us the name of the song was Is She Really Going Out With Him, and that it rocked hard with great lyrics. Back then we didn’t have much respect for Steve Miller. We didn’t hate him like we hated ELO, but his relentless barrage of inane, repetitive and derivate tripe was a constant reminder that no one was interested in our quirky brand of pop music rife with odd rhythms, non-standard time signatures and inside-joke lyrics. Looking back on those days it’s no wonder. Steve Miller’s music was catchy and very radio friendly and ours wasn’t. It was only a day or two after that we found out that it was of course not Steve Miller, but this new cat named Joe Jackson. I picked up Look Sharp and have been a fan ever since, in spite of more than a couple of subsequent misfires and disappointments.
Paddy Chayevsky for Beginners
His name is on a Broadway marquee again this month with a musical version of “The Catered Affair,” one of his lesser works, but having Paddy Chayevsky back in any form is good for our culture.
In the second half of the 20th century, he almost single-handedly invented TV drama, then went on to theater and movies, winning three Academy Awards and leaving behind classics like “Network” and “The Hospital” that tell us more about what went wrong with American media and medicine than the history books do.
On our high-school paper, I had taken over a column from Paddy nee Sidney. We were part of a generation coming of age between wars who hoped we could earn our way in the world with our brains rather than backs, as our immigrant parents were doing. We went on to a free college education at City College of New York and then into the Army, where Sidney was rechristened Paddy.
In the 1950s, he mined our lives for “kitchen sink” dramas: “Marty,” “The Bachelor Party,” “Middle of the Night.” From there, he moved on to the confusions of the larger society with savage satires, not only about TV and doctoring but wartime heroism in “The Americanization of Emily.”
But praise was not universal. At one of our occasional lunches, Paddy’s characteristic wry smile was a grimace. His movie, “The Goddess,” based loosely and respectfully on the life of Marilyn Monroe, had just come out to good reviews. The screenplay would soon be nominated for an Academy Award.
“Got a call from Arthur Miller this morning,” he sighed heavily,” and he said ‘I want to tell you that what you’ve done is despicable.’” Years later, I would recall Paddy’s pain as I sat through “After the Fall,” Miller’s nasty portrayal of Marilyn after her death.
Now, Paddy Chayevsky is best remembered for “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more,” the mantra of the crazed anchorman in “Network.”
A few years after the movie came out, I was in the grill of the Four Seasons, a clubby gathering place for media moguls and their hirelings, having lunch with a literary agent as Paddy passed by and said hello on his way to the next table to be introduced to William Paley, founder of CBS, avatar of the TV executives in the movie who exploit a madman for ratings and then, when they fall, have him killed on camera.
“I must admit,” we overheard Paddy telling Paley, “I’m nervous about meeting you.”
The agent leaned toward my ear. “He should be. They showed ‘Network’ on CBS the other night, and it got lousy ratings.”
Now new generations can discover Paddy Chayevsky’s work on videos and Turner Classic Movies. Start with “Emily,” “Network” and “The Hospital,” and work back to “Marty” in the 1950s. The trip is worth taking.
Cross-posted from my blog.
Spoon’s “Elizabeth Rex”
Recently, I had a chance to see “Elizabeth Rex” performed at Nicu’s Spoon Theater in NYC, written by Timonthy Findley and directed by Joanne Zipay. The play’s principle motivation attempts to unravel the struggle universally experienced by men and women who seem to lack a fundamental emotional knowledge of each other. So does the play provide answers? Not exactly, but it does provoke us to look inward at the embedded beliefs pertaining to the opposite sex.
The play begins on the eve of Shakespeare’s death. The Bard explains to the audience the tragic events of some years earlier when the Earl of Essex was convicted of treason, when he became a political threat to his beloved Queen. To ease the grief of putting her lover to death, “Much Ado About Nothing” is performed in her honor. After the performance the players gather in the barn, and Elizabeth pays them an unexpected visit. Shakespeare, Scott David Nogi, narrates details to the audience.
However, the central focus of the play resides on the two protagonists, Queen Elizabeth I and Ned Lowenscroft the male actor who is the “leading lady” of the day, during the Elizabethan period only men were allowed to perform women’s role. Ned contracted a deadly disease from one of his one-time male lovers. The actor, Michael DiGioi provides a robust spirit to his dying character; he gives a beautiful performance.
We learn quickly that Elizabeth I is torn between her royal duties and her passion for a man. At one point, she bellows, “If you will teach me how to be a woman…I will teach you how to be a man.” The main characters exchange heated words about gender and role playing, but we discover there will be no break-through–only payment for their misjudgments, which is death. Stephanie Barton-Farcas lends a fine performance as the Queen; however, her lack of vocal strength was apparent when she engaged in emotionally charged moments. The charming cast provides relief from Elizabeth and Ned’s proverbial daggers. The stage was too small for such a large cast, but the design provided a wonderful visual backdrop to the play.
Ruby Baby
[From the archives. Originally posted at my place January ‘07.]
Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly is a modern musical masterpiece. It is a quintessential concept album, never wavering from the theme of a teen-aged boy’s (and a maladroit jazz geek at that!) fantasies circa 1960. Part autobiographical, the album captures the essence of the late 50’s early 60’s mixture of cold war paranoia (New Frontier) and the hope for a better future through science (I.G.Y.) Also included is an ironic love story set in the last days of Batista’s Cuba (The Goodbye Look) and a portrait of a lonely and sensitive jazz DJ(The Nightfly) who spends the night shift spinning bop records, smoking Chesterfield Kings and waiting for the phone to ring.
The record is perfect from beginning to end, from lyric to melody, and from meticulous yet soulful musicianship to sonic and tonal quality.
To call Ruby Baby a remake does a disservice to the work: the original is a piece of coal and Fagen’s take is a finely cut diamond. [I count Dion’s version as the original as he had a minor hit with it, but there are some other sides floating around from the era and I don’t know which one came first.] Penned by the seminal songwriting team of Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller , in the hands of Dion it is a forgettable piece of fluff, catchy but unremarkable. Not so under the deft direction of Donald Fagen and producer Gary Katz. Donald heard a sublime jazz arrangement with a score of subtle chord changes hidden between the cracks of this standard 1-4-5 progression, and he made it sound simple and organic. This is one cool record, and I mean cool in the original jazz context. I never tire of hearing it.
Before The Curtains Come Down
It’s usually a risk to see a Broadway show late into its run. For one thing, it’s tired; the performers have been doing 8 shows a week, over and over, and there’s bound to be a certain… lack of freshness. The buzz around even the most amazing show is bound to have slipped as well. And frequently, the show’s original stars - the real “marquee names” who probably justified the multimillion enterprise - have long gone.
In short, there’s a reason I’m not dying to see Hairspray again, now that Harvey Fierstein is two shows away.
I saw Grand Hotel well into its run, when Karen Akers had been replaced by someone who looked and sounded like an uncanny carbon copy, and it had this kind of sluggishness. Everything moved… but just a little slowly. Then again, as Forbidden Broadway nicknamed it, the “Grim Hotel” was never really that much of an “up” show.
By rights, Curtains should suffer just so; it’s not exactly up - though it’s certainly not a down show, by any means. It’s been close to a year, the awards it won in 2007 are largely fodder for poster text, and it is probably soon to close. Yet it was a delight; all of its main stars are still there, still tearing into it with zest, taking it out with a bang, not a whimper. Fred Ebb should be proud.
Ebb, of course, was the lyrics writing half of the legendary team of Kander and Ebb. Along with John Kander, they’ve created some of post Golden Age Broadway’s greatest hits, and helped to define the modern musical. Curtains, the show that was coming together at the time Ebb died, was carried into its final stages with the assistance of Rupert Holmes; but it stands as a final testament to Kander and Ebb’s lifetime of collaboration - a celebration of the theater they loved, and a wicked parody done by truly knowing minds. It’s not perfect, but for what it is, it’s terrific.
The Foundering Fathers
HBO has made John Adams a lot less lovable than Tony Soprano and, despite all the critical tiptoeing around it, picked a poor time to demythologize the making of the American miracle.
In this week’s next-to-last installment, a sour, surly Adams slips out of a half-finished, half-furnished White House to board a crowded jitney and avoid attending the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, a former friend he has come to envy and despise.
This is a typical moment in seven hours of relentless “realism” to offset a century of Hollywood biopics that glorified the Founding Fathers beyond human recognition and now attempts to balance the books by presenting them warts and all but ends up with a visually spectacular exhibition of warts.
It was only in middle age that, as a child of immigrants, I fell deeply in love with the makers of the American Revolution while touring the stately homes of England to view huge tapestries celebrating ancestral slaughter that created a ruling aristocracy who passed along generations of splendor to a few who live at the expense of misery for the many.
Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin fought a war to escape all that and, by some miracle, found a way not to replicate it but create something magnificently new in history that endures to this day.
That they were vain, petty, self-seeking–in a word, human–is not surprising, but a televised tapestry of their faults is no more a cause for self-congratulation than the wall hangings in those palaces built on exploitation.
What the peerless Laura Linney as Abigail Adams keeps warning about in pillow talk would have been helpful to the producers of the HBO epic. “Ambition,” she keeps saying sadly. “Vanity.”
Cross-posted from my blog.
Comic Suicide: Chekov’s “The Seagull”
For our anniversary, Manny and I saw the Classic Stage Company’s production of Chekov’s “The Seagull.” Like any time-honored masterpiece, the play overwhelmed me to the point where I hesitate to comment, since whatever I write will naturally be trite, silly, or as the characters often complain, “boring.”
That’s a major joke in the play, of course: writers worrying over their precious and ceaseless words and whether those words are “great art,” or strange, ridiculous, and pathetic.
The character central to the story is an amateur writer (like me) and his artistic limitations compared to his aspirations torment and infuriate him, which sometimes amuses his family and other times worries them, seeing as he’s so unbalanced and perpetually miserable. Add to the mix his failure in love and eventual, off-stage suicide and oh boy, what fun! But it was.
The play shows us a successful writer, too, who is a slavish lover to the bad writer’s famous actress mother. (Famous actress mother and failed writer son quote Hamlet to each other before the son stages his very bad debut play for the family’s entertainment.)
“The Seagull” offers the audience two actresses and two writers—men. The mother and her lover are famous. The son and the aspiring actress with a sad fate (whom the son loves throughout) overreach. They share an ambition for fame (writers were more famous then—that’s my guess) and an ability to create transcendence, which they associate with fame. Or at least the young actress does. The poor bedeviled son is less sanguine. He’s desperate and distraught and hilarious.
The Omega Star
He had a voice made for roaring like a hero about to charge into battle against a thousand bloodthirsty tribal warriors so naturally in just about every movie he made screenwriters and directors couldn’t resist the temptation to give him as many roaring moments as they could cram into two hours or three.
His Moses roared. His Ben-Hur roared. His Michelangelo roared, at the Pope, which has to be a mortal sin.
His most famous—or at least most parodied—line from all his movies is a roar.
"You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"
It’s hard to be subtle when you’re roaring, and greatness in movie stars is not usually judged by their loudest moments but by their silences. Charlton Heston wasn’t known for his silences.
Vampire Weekend: Roar, Lions, Roar
I must admit it thrills me –as a Columbia University alum AND as a dweeby, over-educated white guy–to wake up in a world where Vampire Weekend is the IT indie rock band of the moment (making the cover of Spin on Internet hype and a fan circulated CD-R before the January release of its debut album).
It turns out that the band’s self-titled CD is a good as the hype–tuneful, clean, smart songs in tight arrangements over herky jerky but locked down rhythms you can dance to: it’s a sound that blends its obvious influences (guitar driven South and West African pop, brainy early 80s new age) into a something remarkably fresh.
It’s a young person’s album–made by men just out of their spongy college years when every new experience and sound soaks in deeply. And it’s made by a real band–whose music reflects the personalties and influences of each member.
So who would you cite as your influences? asked Bwog, the Columbia Blue and White magazine blog.
Ezra [Koenig, guitarist, singer, lyricist]: Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Kanda Bongomen, Reggaeton. I want to call it bodega music but I’m pretty sure that’s not politically correct. It’s called Bachata, I think.
Rostam [Batmanglij, keyboards, guitar, music major]: I’ve been listening to a lot of Beethoven. (Laughs) No, really.
Ezra: My favorite African guitarist is Orchestra Baobab.
Chris [Tomson drums, music major]: I’ve been listening to the Band.
Being A Woman and Cheap Sentiment: Davis at 100
Given that I started this gig off of Joan’s 100th (or, more likely 103rd), I suppose one ought to consider Bette.
Edward Albee tells this wonderful story - and while it’s been everywhere, it’s somehow more meaningful 
that he told it to me, and only me, over dinner in a fast food restaurant on North Avenue in Baltimore - about the fact that Davis wanted to do Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on film, and that she was his first choice. Albee thought it spectacular - and who wouldn’t - that Davis would walk in at the start and say “What a dump. Who said that, George, ‘What a dump’?”
When, of course, it was her.
My Davis initiation came early, and in the best way - the string of films from 1933 to 1941 that virtually define both her and some of the best of Hollywood - Now Voyager, The Letter, Jezebel… some of the best acting, best direction, finest writing that one can see in the Golden Age. Her perch atop the Warner Brothers star system was tailor made - the naturalistic actress paired with the studio most interested in realism, such as it was presented in Depression era film.
Charlton Heston, 1923-2008
He isn’t often mentioned in the same breath with great male heartthrobs such as Gary Cooper or his contemporaries Marlon Brando and Gregory Peck, but Charlton Heston was one of the most breathtakingly handsome men in the annals of American cinema. To get his first major role in a big-budget movie, all he had to do was walk across the Paramount lot–Cecil B. DeMille spotted him and presto, Heston was the lead in The Greatest Show on Earth. Heston’s was a beauty uniquely suited to epics, so striking, symmetrical and sculpted that no matter how wide you made the screen, how much period paraphernalia you hung around the set or how many good-looking extras you had milling around, he held the gaze.
But if general gorgeousness were all it took to make a memorable performance in an epic, Jeffrey Hunter would have hit King of Kings out of the park. Heston could take a character like Judah Ben-Hur, almost literally a plaster saint, and give him life. Not real life, mind you, but if you wanted reality you didn’t seek it at a roadshow engagement. What Heston gave his historical characters was the power of his own belief in them, no matter how improbable the setting. His finely detailed memoirs reveal a man who never wanted for self-respect, and it translated into a screen persona that absolutely demanded your credulity. Heston believed he was Moses, El Cid, a heterosexual Michelangelo, believed it with such burning intensity he swept the audience along. You may question the setting, the special effects, the dialogue, the dialect, the leading lady’s eyeliner, but never Heston’s absolute conviction in his character.
Damned Dirty Apes
Frankly, my cultural and style icons are largely women and gay men, and I just don’t have a lot to say about Charlton Heston; I think Heston was the right guy in the right place to take advantage of a need for larger than life presence onscreen… but largely he wasn’t especially brilliant, nor was he an especially good actor.
My favorite moment to recall Heston is in the documentary version of The Celluloid Closet - any thinking
gay critic’s bible of gays on film from the beginning - when Gore Vidal describes making Ben-Hur, writing in gay subtext for Heston’s Hur and his best male friend. And the director (William Wyler) told Vidal to tell it to the actor playing opposite Heston (Stephen Boyd)… but not to Heston; and you can see, in the clip they play, how the one actor is playing unrequited love… and Heston is being Heston. As only he can.
Brad Braden: ALL Man
“All About Eve is about adults, a diminishing breed in an America of perpetual, panicky adolescence.” James Wolcott’s recent sentence about Bette Davis’s crowning flick popped into my head when I heard of Charlton Heston’s passing.
Heston was the most grown-up, adult man of my cinematic youth. He didn’t have the artistry of Burt Lancaster, or the sheer charisma of Kirk Douglas, but he was a Man, with that capital M.
I saw all their movies on what was charmingly called “The 4:30 Movie” on WABC in New York every day after school in the midseventies. These films were the last wave (or gasp) of old Hollywood. They were in color, just one signal that we weren’t in the same place as the days of Gable and Tracy. But we also clearly weren’t in the same place as that time’s Dog Day Afternoon and Marathon Man. I didn’t see those movies as a kid, but I remember the commercials for them, sitting amid my beloved 4:30 Movie, and I wasn’t very attracted to them.
But I was enthralled by The Greatest Show on Earth because of Heston. I thought Brad Braden was the sexiest thing I had ever seen. Even the character name was no-holds-barred manly.
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