Wednesdays in October | 25 films
And the Lord said unto Hollywood, let there be a hero, granite of jaw and beefcake of physique, a figure of such upright strength that he shall rule over Great Epics and command Golden Statuettes. And he shall take a name that will signal his might over the mere Lemmons and Borgnines and Pecks of his time.
And so, John Charles Carter of Evanston, Illinois, became Charlton Heston (1923-2008), the undisputed master of the historical and biblical sagas that were the blockbusters of the decade between the mid 50s and mid 60s. Today, we think of him, somewhat justifiably, as this moral monolith of limited range, but this month-long TCM tribute, while naturally loaded with all those BIG pictures, may also give a glimpse into other shades of a more earthly man known to friends and family as Chuck, although don’t expect to discover anything quite as startling as the knowledge that Soylent Green is people. For those who already appreciate his work, the line-up is a real feast.
The tribute kicks off October 4 with a full day of programming, hosted by Ben Mankiewicz, to mark what would have been Heston’s 100th birthday. Many of the really Big Ones are here, most notably one of the two biblical epics eternally associated with the star. Ben-Hur (1959), aptly advertised as “the entertainment experience of a lifetime,” was a huge commercial and critical success, saving the financially teetering MGM from utter ruin and winning 11 Academy Awards. As a Jewish nobleman consigned to slavery by his one-time friend and bitter rival, the Roman Messala (Stephen Boyd), Heston’s solid righteousness, first recognized with a Golden Globe nomination for The Ten Commandments (1956), won out over vastly more nuanced and complex work by the likes of Jack Lemmon (Some Like It Hot, 1959) and James Stewart (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959). Jesus makes a cameo appearance, but the standout sequence was, of course, the chariot race, a year in preparation, five weeks of shooting (over the course of three months) and costing $1 million of the film’s roughly $16 million-plus initial budget, the costliest production up to that time.
Other historical epics featured on this first day of programming cast Heston as a medieval knight in The War Lord (1965); as real-life British General Charles Gordon, getting the best of Laurence Olivier’s religious fanatic (in Arab brownface!) in Khartoum (1966); and as a ranch foreman in the sprawling Western The Big Country (1958). More accustomed to establishment directors like William Wyler and Cecil B. DeMille, Heston also worked with mavericks Sam Peckinpah, at the beginning of his career with the Civil War actioner Major Dundee (1965), a kind of Western Dirty Dozen, and Nicholas Ray, better known for intense character studies, taking on an epic box office bomb, 55 Days at Peking (1963), set during the Boxer Rebellion. Heston wanted to do the film for the chance to work with Ray, but the director suffered a heart attack and had to be replaced. It was Ray’s final major release.
Quick: Name a Charlton Heston comedy. [Loud buzzer] Too late! The man apparently had little of the skill nor much opportunity to handle humor, but he made an interesting supporting player in Richard Lester’s rollicking, highly entertaining take on the Dumas classic The Three Musketeers (1973) and its sequel The Four Musketeers (1974). At this point well into his career, Heston had no qualms about deliciously playing the villain, Cardinal Richelieu, although his scenes in these colorful, droll romps can hardly be called comic. (The astute reader will note that Heston had a small role, appropriately wielding a rifle, as Andie MacDowell’s father in the Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton rom-com Town & Country, 2001, but most critics would argue there was nothing funny about that bomb.)
The birthday programming also includes two lesser-known films. In Counterpoint (1967), Heston is a conductor who, along with his orchestra, is taken captive by a classical music-loving Nazi general. No, this is also not a comedy. Heston is a commendably cunning Long John Silver in the faithful made-for-TV adaptation of Treasure Island (1990), with a 14-year-old Christian Bale as Jim Hawkins.
There are more large-scale dramas on hand in the second evening-only schedule, both set in Hawaii but with nary a true Hawaiian in the large main casts. Heston is a close-minded land baron in the romantic melodrama Diamond Head (1962). The Hawaiians (1970) is based on the later chapters of James A. Michener’s nearly 1000-page 1959 novel “Hawaii.” Heston is a rebellious plantation owner in this sequel of sorts to the more successful Julie Andrews vehicle, also called Hawaii (1966), based on an earlier chapter of the book.
The evening also includes two earlier, pre-Moses roles. Bad for Each Other (1953) is an obscure medical melodrama with a noirish touch, primarily in the form of femme fatale Lizabeth Scott. And okay, we lied: The Private War of Major Benson (1955) is a bona fide comedy and Oscar nominee for Best Original Story. On hiatus from parting the Red Sea during a break in that monumental production, Heston worked for no salary but a percentage of the film’s substantial profits as a hard-nosed Army officer who takes command of the ROTC program at a Catholic military school.
The must-see of the night, however, is Touch of Evil (1958), Orson Welles’ stunning film noir about corruption in adjoining Mexican-US border towns. The very gringo Heston does an engaging job as an upstanding Mexican prosecutor — a bit of casting that would be rightfully frowned on today — on his honeymoon with the lovely and besieged Janet Leigh. He is dragged into a murder investigation where he confronts a monstrous Welles as the American town’s bigoted, alcoholic head cop, who is not averse to planting evidence and implicating innocent people. Of the film’s many memorable scenes, including Welles’ sad interlude with a former flame played by Marlene Dietrich, the most remarkable is the opening crane shot, a continuous three-and-a-half-minute piece of virtuoso filmmaking that is still widely discussed, admired and imitated (see Robert Altman’s The Player, 1992). Heston, who was hired to star early on in pre-production, was the one who pushed the studio to let Welles direct. As often happened with his pictures, the studio took control of the editing before its release as a B movie, but in 1998, a team of editors and other film artists reworked the piece according to a 58-page memo Welles left behind. The restored version has an additional 15 minutes and, significantly, eliminated the credits that had been placed over the legendary opening shot.
Heston frequently portrayed The Great Men on screen, i.e., the real-life figures who, for better or worse, loomed large in history, among them Andrew Jackson (twice), Buffalo Bill Cody, Thomas Jefferson, Marc Antony, Brigham Young and even the notorious Josef Mengele. In the third night of the tribute, he takes on two more.
In The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), he is Michelangelo, painting the Sistine Chapel and driving Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison) to distraction by answering the pontiff/patron’s question “When will you make an end?” with a dismissive “When I am finished!” Director Carol Reed captures the act of artistic creation well, and Heston, generally convincing in the role despite the script’s infidelity to the artist’s personal life, holds up well against Harrison in the numerous witty verbal exchanges.
Having once done a small part as Henry VIII (Crossed Swords, 1977), Heston took on the substantially meatier role of the king’s nemesis Thomas More in a new adaptation of Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons (1988). Produced for television by Heston’s son and directed by the actor himself, this version is not as well-known as the 1966 Oscar winner but more faithful to Bolt’s original with the restoration of a Greek chorus-like character called The Common Man. Heston had campaigned for the role in the earlier version that won Best Actor for Paul Scofield and kept his connection with it through the years, playing it on stage in Los Angeles, Chicago and London. This version retains much of the impressive London cast, including Sir John Gielgud and Vanessa Redgrave.
No stranger to religious figures, Heston is also featured briefly as a rather stentorian John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), a lengthy rendering of the life of Christ by George Stevens (A Place in the Sun, 1951; Giant, 1956). Making his English language film debut, Swedish actor Max von Sydow, who once played chess against Death for Ingmar Bergman, does a worthy job portraying Jesus, undercut by a distracting run of pop-up cameos by the likes of John Wayne, Shelley Winters, Ed Wynn and Pat Boone and a wig that’s more Prince Valiant than the Prince of Peace.
Also in the night’s programming: The Mountain Men (1980) pairs Heston with Brian Keith as a couple of hard-drinkin’, hard fightin’, hard lovin’ fur trappers in the Oregon Territory of the 1830s, and the star has “one of the most interesting and admirable performances of his career” (The New York Times) as an aging football star past his prime in Number One (1969).
Equal to his fame as a star of big epics, Charlton Heston will be remembered for three of the most enduring sci-fi/dystopian movies of all time. Two of them form a compelling double feature on the final Wednesday of the tribute. Soylent Green (1973) is arguably second only to Planet of the Apes (1968) in this aspect of his late career, an ecological thriller with one of the most famous penultimate lines in cinema history. Heston plays a cop in what was then the near future (2022!) when humans on an overpopulated and polluted Earth are kept nourished by the mysterious products of Soylent Industries. When Heston is assigned to investigate the murder of one of the company’s board members, he finds himself deep in a conspiracy, eventually uncovering the secret ingredient of the world’s food supply. Critics of the time gave it mixed reviews, but it has outlasted those opinions as a brutal look at corporate corruption and the destruction of the planet. This was the great Edward G. Robinson’s final performance, completed just two weeks before his death.
In The Omega Man (1971), Heston believes he is the only immune survivor of a plague caused by global-scale biological warfare. With a tenuous grip on his sanity, he patrols Los Angeles hunting down members of a cult of plague victims who have been transformed into nocturnal mutants, until one day he encounters a handful of young people who have not yet succumbed to the disease. The treatment of the story, based loosely on noted sci-fi author Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel “I Am Legend,” was not always handled with subtlety and intelligence, occasioning many derisive reviews at the time. But it has survived as the inspiration for pop culture products as varied as the TV series The Simpsons and Mystery Science Theater 3000, a song by The Police, a classic Argentinian comic book and as one of director Tim Burton’s favorite movies. Matheson’s book was earlier adapted as The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price and later as the Will Smith thriller I Am Legend (2007).
The series wraps up with screenings of three minor Heston vehicles. The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959) is a seafaring thriller co-starring Gary Cooper and originally intended to be an Alfred Hitchcock picture. The plot of Skyjacked (1972) is adequately summed up by the title, with Heston as a heroic pilot. Finally, he is an archeologist who makes some seriously bad decisions in the mummy horror picture The Awakening (1980).
