Balls and Walnuts
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Chuck Heston’s Greatest Hits
CNN: Charlton Heston dies at 84.
I grew up with Charlton Heston. This latter day John Wayne epitomizes for me a certain type of actor: the hypermasculine lead with a martyr complex, whose on-screen testosteronity was exceeded only by his off-screen right wing looniness. Chuck was the Man . . . well, until Mel Gibson came along. And when Mel gets too old or too shark-jumped to matter anymore, doubtless some other nut will take his place.
But we were talkin’ Chuck. Chuck wasn’t always a Republican darling, a Choice- and Affirmative Action-hating NRA poster boy; according to Wikipedia, he supported Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy and marched with Martin Luther King. He even “called for public support for President Johnson’s Gun Control Act of 1968.” Why the change of heart? The [two] obituaries [that I bothered to read] don’t say.
Let’s have a moment of silence for a man who left us with some memorable Hollywood moments:
The Omega Man, the Last Man on Earth . . . but of course, if you’ve seen the movie, you know he’s the Alpha as well as the Omega.
THE scene from the end of Planet of the Apes. Still, if you’re gonna be stuck on a post-apocalyptic ape-ridden planet, you could do worse than have actress Linda Harrison at your back.
Touch of Evil. With a mustache and enough Man Tan, you too can be Mexican.
Soylent Green: Heston figures it out an hour after the rest of us.
The Moses we know and love.
Rest in peace, Chuck.
D.
I’m so sad he didn’t get shot by some nut with a gun. I PRAYED he’d be shot. (not very charitable, am I?)
But this goes to prove that:
1. There is no god. 2. If there is a god, he doesn’t do irony. 3. My prayers, when for something rotten, don’t come true, which can mean that 4. there IS a god and he doesn’t do cheap shots.
Jeez, Sam, he had Alzheimer’s at the end! Isn’t that sufficient divine retribution?
I have mixed feelings for the man. I revile his politics (in recent years, that is) and I never thought much of his acting . . . but it’s like with Mel Gibson: he was the kind of actor you could not ignore. “Larger than life,” as many of the obits say.
The mother of a friend of mine is an Episcopal minister – she always used to say that if she got to Heaven and Moses didn’t look like Charlton Heston, she was going to be mighty disappointed.
I know, I know. Poor guy/Mean me. But irony is more fun than Alzheimer’s.
Anyway, now they can pry the gun out of his cold, dead hands.
Now I’m picturing the beginning of Young Frankenstein, when the old guy is trying to get Frankenstein’s notebook out of the corpse’s dead hands.
ps: I have a tiny portrait painting of Moses which I got from my grandparents’ house after they had died. Kind of a rarity, considering we’re not supposed to have graven images lying about.