Chuckles Heston - RIP

I met Charlton Heston back when they did the re-release of TOUCH OF EVIL, interviewed him for my article on the restoration of the film. It was a strange experience - he was an old man. He looked old. He acted old. Completely different than the Heston I grew up watching on screen in cheesy movies and Biblical epics. As a kid, I saw him in EXODUS and BEN HUR and other big films that played on TV on holidays. When you’re a kid who is a complete introvert and loves movies, Holidays are often a mine field of relatives you see once or twice a year, plus the rest of the family, and it gets boring fast. But, if part of the holidays might include some big Biblical film where Heston races chariots and women wear filmy clinging clothes... well, that can turn a boring evening with relatives into something exciting. And Heston was the strong, powerful, take no BS hero in all of these films. I never really thought Jewish leader Moses was a kick-ass tough guy until I saw Heston play him.... he didn’t seem like that in Sunday school lessons.



A little later, Heston became the first Ah-nuld - playing the macho bad-ass heroes in sc-fi films. “Get your stinking paws off me you damned dirty ape!” PLANET OF THE APES was one of my favorite movies - saw it on TV as a kid and the twist end blew my mind. And Moses sure could kick monkey butt! After that Heston kicked butt in SOYLENT GREEN and OMEGA MAN and other cool films from my childhood. He also starred in another of my favorite films from childhood - THE NAKED JUNGLE (about an army of fire ants... coming right at us!). He made all kinds of great films, or, at least entertaining ones. He was also in two great western films, MAJOR DUNDEE and WILL PENNY. And who could forget him as the macho lady’s man football player in NUMBER ONE and the pilot in AIRPORT 75 (my favorite in the series) and the cop in TWO MINUTE WARNING?

But Heston turned into a grumpy old man - NRA President and right wing politics. That stuff was always there - it’s part of his tough-but-religious characters. I didn’t agree with his politics, but it was cool to see him and Ah-nuld in TRUE LIES.

So, when I was preparing to interview him, I came up with some hard ball gun questions about hunting weapons and self defense weapons and MAC-10s and other machine guns... but when I sat down at the table with him, he was somebody’s great grandfather *and* that actor who had been in so many films from my childhood. A nice guy, trying to find the best answers to questions about a film he made as a fairly young man - TOUCH OF EVIL. Who could remember back that far? Yet he tried to give complete answers and come up with interesting stories about the film. Instead of hardball questions, I told him how much I loved NAKED JUNGLE as a kid. You always worry that when you say you were a kid when you saw it on some Saturday afternoon TV showing decades after it was new you’re going to make him feel old. But he thanked me, and then it was the next reporter’s turn.

In retrospect, I think Heston was an underrated actor. He did all kinds of movies, all kinds of characters, and even if they did all look and sound like Heston (in TOUCH OF EVIL he played a Mexican police detective... who sounded just like Heston and looked like Heston after a tanning booth accident), he gave every role a feeling of strength and determination. He made Moses into an action hero. What other actor could have done that?

No one will ever be able to replace Charlton Heston - he will be missed.

- Bill