newcritics

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.

And in every role he played he faced the same challenge.  He had to act around his own monumental handsomeness.

And while other great movie stars have had their careers clarified for us by their most off-beat performances, by the roles in which they step away from their type casting or by parts that twisted their images a bit—Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Henry Fonda in Fort Apache, Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in The Sweet Smell of Success—roles that open our eyes to their talent and make us look at their other movies with fresh appreciation, Heston was practically cast in stone in the public’s imagination by the movie in which he was most rigidly typecast, The Ten Commandments.

But, while I don’t quite agree with Erik Loomis that "Heston really couldn’t act, but he sure as hell could overact" and the only reason for watching Major Dundee is that it was directed by Sam Peckinpah, I see his point, and I think Rob Farley is right that Heston wasn’t a good enough actor (or overactor) to transcend his own iconic image the way John Wayne was able to do his.  There just aren’t any Tom Dunsons, Ethan Edwardses, or Rooster Cogburns on Heston’s resume.  There aren’t any Davy Crocketts, Big Jake McCandles, or Sean Thorntons either.   

But there is Major Dundee and Will Penny and Steve Leech and Robert Neville and Mike Vargas, and when you get right down to it most people under 50 only know Heston’s work from watching it on TV and as Phil Nugent says:

In the 1970s, I grew up watching Charlton Heston on TV. There’s
something wrong about that right there. The six-foot-three, deep-voiced
Heston, who sometimes suggested the Muppets’ Sam the Eagle come to
life, was scaled to the big screen, and there’s something perverse
about having gotten to know him on my parents’ living room
fourteen-incher.

Speaking of television, though, it was on the small screen that Heston gave one of his finest performances, and I’m glad to see that Rob shares my fondness for Heston’s Long John Silver in the great TV adaptation of Treasure Island, which Rob is right to call the best film version of Stevenson’s novel.  With all due respect to Wallace Beery and Robert Newton, Heston is what I always thought Silver should be, not a scruvy knave or even a charming rogue, but a hero as villain.  Treasure Island is a swashbuckling adventure but you don’t know that until you realize that it’s the pirates, Silver and Captain Billy Bones, who are the swashbucklers.  Oliver Reed plays Billy Bones in this one, to underscore the point, with Christopher Lee playing Blind Pew, both there as bows to their characters in The Three Musketeeers, I’m sure.  There’s a reason Jim Hawkins is drawn to Bones and then, especially, to Silver.  They’re both heroic figures at the end of their tethers.  Silver is holding on hard enough to suggest he might still be able to pull himself back up.  Heston does some of the scurvy knave bit and plenty of the charming rogue, but of course underneath it all is the still powerful hero.

Jim Hawkins, by the way, is played by a very young Christian Bale.

Still, my favorite Heston performance is his Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers.

As Richelieu, Heston most definitely does not roar.  He is subtle.  His performances is full of telling silences.  I love it when he wanders distractedly through his own torturer chamber, absent-mindedly acknowledging the greetings of his awed victims, and the smoothness with which he hides his impatience with the idiot king he is forced to rule France through is beautifully modulated.  He’s also terrific in the moment when he realizes that D’Artagnan has turned the tables on him, saving himself from the Cardinal’s vengeance by producing a before-the-fact pardon written by the Cardinal himself.  He allows himself one quick flash of irritation that he immediately smothers with a self-chiding amusement that he uses to dispense some disinterested advice.  "One should be careful what one writes down and to whom one gives it."

His best scene is the one between him and Faye Dunaway as Milady de Winter.  Milady has just declared her intention to get her revenge upon D’Artagnan and Heston’s Richelieu cannot hide his disgust—not at her wish to kill the young musketeer, at her very unprofessional emotion.  His only interest in her is as a professional spy and assassin and she’s insisting that he see her as a human being and to great men like Richelieu mere human beings are of no use or importance.  It’s a chilling moment, especially since it’s followed up by her declaring how much she hates the Cardinal and—I hope I got this right, I’m working from memory here—he replies with a very priestly, "I love you, my child."

Whole bunch of tributes popping up on the web.  Besides Phil’s, there’s Mrs Peel’s, which finishes off with a great, sexy quote from The Greatest Show on Earth, KathyG’s, Glenn Kenney’s, and the Siren’s. 

Weboy offers a contrarian view.

The Siren’s post includes a nice appreciation Heston’s work in The Big Country:

He’s also the Siren’s favorite thing in The Big Country, a
movie she loves and has seen many times. Heston’s character, the
unfortunately named Steve Leech, is often described as a heavy but he’s
no such thing, just a strong silent type eaten up with love for Carroll
Baker and determined not to lose her. Heston often had a lack of
chemistry with his leading ladies, perhaps because the diva-esque
prerogatives of stars like Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner drove the
punctual, meticulous Heston round the bend. But in The Big Country
his scenes with Baker smolder, and his longing for her is so nakedly
sexual and apparent that you sympathize with Leech long before the
character starts to do anything sympathetic.

And for those of you who have trouble getting past Heston’s politics, there’s this from the McEwan:

Sure, he chewed the scenery and turned "bulging neck tendons" into an
emotional prop, but he was damn compelling. So compelling, in fact,
that I could watch one of his films and forget altogether for two hours
or so that there was very little I actually liked about the guy.

He was an epic film star with an epic personality, and I loved to hate
him as much as I hated to love him. That might not sound like much of a
compliment, but it is.

Six Degrees of Charlton Heston:  My high school drama teacher studied at Northwestern University where she played Maria in a production of Twelfth Night that also starred Patrica Neal as Olivia, Cloris Leachman as Viola, Paul Lynde as Sir Toby Belch, and—wait for it—Charlton Heston as Duke Orsino.

Ok, I embellished a bit there at the end.  Heston attended Northwestern, but he was there a couple years ahead of my drama teacher.  But his time there overlapped with Neal’s and Leachman’s who were still there when she arrived and she and the rest of them were in that production of Twelfth Night together.