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.

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."    (Never work from memory.  See Ian Blanton's comment.)

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.  The Siren's 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.

Comments

[Mike Schilling]

Still, though, my favorite Heston performance is his Cardinal Richelieu

Absolutely. What wonderful films those were; even Raquel Welch gives a wonderfully funny and unselfconscious performance. Richard Lester is remembered nowadays for his skill with the camera, but he must have been exceptional with actors.

By the way, does anyone else remember that Li'l Abner had a character who was a stereotypical phony Hollywood liberal named "Charlton Peston"?

[sfmike]

My favorite Heston performance is in "The Naked Jungle," where he's battling an invasion of army ants in Brazil with the mail-order bride Eleanor Parker at his side. There is not a frame that isn't fabulous and/or campy, which come to think of it is true of every movie ever produced by the wildly underrated producer George Pal. And the army ants are genuinely frightening enough that one yearns for the safety of a figure like Charlton Heston who can overcome ANYTHING. Plus, the entire experience makes his character a better person. What more can you ask for?

[Linkmeister]

Something I've wondered about and have yet to see addressed: how did he go from classic liberal civil rights marcher with Dr. King to spokesperson for the ultra-conservative NRA?

[Ken Houghton]

John Wayne transcended his own iconic image? In what, The Conqueror, where he proved he couldn't act (released the same year he proved he could, of all times), or in The Cowboys, which is a bravura career apotheosis, followed by unmitigated drek?

[actor212]

I gotta disagree with you mildly, Lance on this one.

Heston was an overweening one-dimensional character actor. As a leading man, yes, he could carry a movie, the way Tom Cruise can, but he was most assuredly no actor of any bona fides. Again, the way Tom Cruise is.

That said, I throw out "Omega Man" as perhaps his best performance on screen, mostly because he had very few people to overwhelm with his bellicosity. It forced him to take it down a notch and his "evenings" in front of the chessboard were perhaps the closest he came to apeing (sorry!) acting.

He was, for me, a thoroughly unengaging and uninteresting actor.

[actor212]

Ken,

John Wayne transcended his image the way Ahnuld has, by poking fun at himself and his image.

[Ken Muldrew]

My favorite Heston roar was actually given by Joe Flaherty in the SCTV spoof of Towering Inferno where Flaherty's Heston bellows to the Burger King employee, "DOUBLE WHOPPER WITH CHEESE!!!".

My favorite Heston movies were Omega Man and Mother Lode; the first for its silliness and the second for the outrageous accent and (more likely, given what I remember of myself from 25 years ago) Kim Basinger.

[M.A.Peel]

Yea, so much love for Lester's Musketeers. Heston is great, followed by Oliver Reed's Athos.

[KC45s]

More than once I've been tempted to pick up Heston's memoirs to see how exactly he became Hollywood's undisputed king of the Dark Future. I guess that, having conquered the movies with portrayals of history’s great men, it was natural he’d then look ahead.

I won't judge him as an actor, but clearly he delivered as a movie star. That tough image even saved him during his disaster movie phase--it was actually plausible Heston (and probably no one else) could survive relationships with the likes of Ava Gardner and Karen Black. Of course, Apes offers more of a reward with that dandy little cavegirl. What a conservative dream she was: big boobs and congenital muteness.

[Lance]

Ken Houghton: John Wayne transcended his own iconic image? In what...?,

Um...those movies I listed his roles in, Red River, The Searchers, True Grit...

actor212: I gotta disagree with you mildly, Lance on this one.

Actor, you'll have to take it up with the Siren, Phil Nugent, and the rest. I'm not going to the mat for Heston. In a list of the leading men who became stars in the late 1940s and 1950s---in no particular order they include Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Gregory Peck, Brando!---Heston looks like a piker, clocking in barely ahead of Rock Hudson in my book.

Still, that's pretty distinguished company.

Mrs Peel, Heston was good as Richelieu, but he follows Reed. His scene with Dunaway is fun, but Reed's big scene with her in The Four Musketeers when he threatens to kill her is stunning! Was there ever a sexier death threat in the history of movies. And Dunaway reacts with a mixture of extreme terror and desire. It's beautiful.

[actor212]

It's interesting that each generation comes up with a dozen or so "stars" of which maybe two or three are worthy of it on merit.

Your list, Lance, for example: Brando, who changed screen acting, Jack Lemmon, and Burt Lancaster. The rest were commodities.

Today, Johnny Depp, perhaps Denzel Washington...

[Steven Hart]

Richard Lester's Musketeer flicks are loaded with personal best performances for several actors, not the least of them Heston. Richelieu is probably my favorite Heston performance, too. For starters, it's interesting to see him in a role where his manly frame is swaddled in unflattering robes, and his chiseled looks buried under a cap and unflattering 'do. It's all about that voice, and the deceptively avuncular manner.

Interesting also that Heston had such a strong taste for bleak, dystopian science fiction: Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, The Omega Man. When Heston went on his jihad against Ice-T and Body Count for doing a song from the point of view of a cop-killer, why didn't Ice-T toss Beneath the Planet of the Apes back at him? That one ends with Heston personaly wiping out all life on Earth.

[W. Ian Blanton]

Hey, Lance.

I agree with your assessment on "The Three 7 Four Musketeers". Both in regards to Heston, and affection for the movie itself.

One caveat. The line I believe you're referring to is not with Faye Dunaways "Milady DeWinter", it's actually in conversation with Rochefort, where he asks him, if I recall; if he (Rochefort) fears him. Rochefort replies in the affirmative, but then adds, "I also hate you."

At which point Heston(Richelieu) replies:

"I...love you, my son....even when you fail."

I'd have to watch them both again to be sure, but I don't believe he ever says that to Milady (suuure give me an excuse to break those movies out and watch them again!).

Anyways, marvelous, marvelous movie. Every attempt since then has been a sheer waste of time, sadly.

[Lance]

Ian, now that you mention it, I think you're right. Shoot. Now I'm going to have to go watch both movies again too, just to make sure. A blogger's work is never done.