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. No wonder Betty Hutton was agog. Surely Harrison Ford based some of Indiana Jones on Brad: the hat, the leather jacket, the whip! Then there was The Naked Jungle. The title itself titillated the school girl, and again, there was that compelling body, finally pulling Eleanor Parker into its nooks and creases. I think they played Ben-Hur several times a year, which was fine with me. Nothing fires a young girl’s imagination like a chariot race with matching studs (read that as you will). Even Michelangelo—I clearly remember The Agony and the Ecstasy during Easter week one year-â€â€was virility and passion incarnate.
Pauline Kael captured Heston perfectly in her review of The Planet of the Apes:
“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. He represents American power — and he has the profile of an eagle.”
Heston acted with that body to give authenticity to these Men. He wasn’t just saying the wordsâ€â€he was bringing a truth to the characters by his knowledge and expertise as a physically powerful man himself. There is a sense of confidence and entitlement that can’t be faked, and it made him the distinctive actor that he was.
Of course we watched The Ten Commandments in the evening at Easter, but his Moses didn’t impress me as much as his Brad. Maybe because there could be no good fantasy life with “the chosen of the Chosen People.†Much too holy for such thoughts.
I didn’t keep up much with Charlton as an adult. Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green are in the DNA of my generation, and he was great in both. I thought he was an excellent Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lester’s Three/Four Musketeers, and I loved his guest appearance on Friends with Joey Tribbiani.
I also didn’t pay much attention to his politics, one way or another. It was too much of a buzz kill to the zing of my youthful fantasies about him.
Angel: You are a sourpuss, aren’t you?
Brad Braden: Yeah.
Angel: You want to bite somebody?
Brad Braden: Yeah.
Angel: Well, pick your spot.
Sad his death. I am no movie critic, but I just want to comment that he played a nice variety of roles. Near the beginning of today’s Washington Post obituary, they say, “Rarely a doubter, never a coward, inconceivable as a shirker, he played men of granite virtue no matter the epoch.” However the was a doubter (and changed his views) in the two movies of his I am particularly fond of — “The Naked Jungle” (co-starring beautiful Eleanor Parker) and “The Big Country” (co-starring Gregory Peck). In the latter he spent most of his time belittling Peck’s character; changed that view at the end. In “The Naked Jungle,” which is very entertaining (it’s the one where he is a South American jungle plantation owner fighting a vast army of red army ants), he has some memorable, risque scenes with Parker that are at odds with his 100% heroic, always right image. I heartedly recommend the movie. He plays the plantation owner who has spent his whole life fighting the jungle to build his plantation. He is the only white person in the area, and it is mentioned that it was “taboo” to cohabit with the native women. So he ordered a mail-order bride (who turned out to be Parker). Anyway, the great scene that I, a boy then, will always remember is the great electricity between him and Parker when he is crushed to find out that she is not a virgin (was married to a man who committed suicide). Earlier he had been bragging that all the furnishings of his plantation were brand new imports, such as his piano. Parker throws this comment back in his face — that many things like pianos are better having been used a lot, and that his new piano (that he was so proud of) was a bad piano. Obviously, being a virgin himself, he felt uncomfortable –to say the least– with the more experienced Parker. Eventually he came around, of course.