But you do what you can. We have a Heston tribute page with clips of some of his later sci-fi work, movies that would have been far far less worthy without him. Would anyone remember The Omega Man for Anthony Zerbe’s scenery-chewing smorgasbord as the hippie-zombie leader alone? Would Zerbe, a craftsman in his own right, have taken on the project if Heston wasn’t on board?

Something happened in the film business soon after the mid-60’s, and we sense that it only had a little to do with cultural or political revolution, or color television. Why was it films like The Agony and the Ecstasy could no longer be made? Why was it that Hitchcock, after practically inventing a genre, and making classic upon classic, had to resort to Bruce Dern in Family Plot, which is a fun watch but no classic, and Frenzy, which is not nearly either? Was there no room in the market for a Hitchcock?

We’ll come up with the answer. Someday.

One last note about The Agony and the Ecstasy (Amazon link below.) The movie, as movies must be, is a well-executed abridgement of only the one section of the book involving the confrontations with the Pope and Michelanelo’a most famous non-sculpture. Irving Stone’s book is well worth the read for that and for other details, such as Michelangelo’s attachment to the land, his related approach to his favored medium, marble, and his spirituality.

He added class to whatever project he touched, from his work in famous epics – as Moses in The Ten Commandments, Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, and Judah the Jewish chariot racer in Ben Hur - and on through his science fiction period of the late 60s and 70s.

Commentary may likely concentrate on those early classics. Here, as you might imagine, we’ll diverge a bit and briefly touch upon his science fiction work, without which our popular culture would just not be the same.

One example would be Heston’s star turn in the The Omega Man, a movie that would be laughable without his participation, and comes near to being so even with it. Will Smith’s own star turn in the recent I Am Legend is, for a movie as a whole, a better version of the Richard Matheson novella, but it will enter the cultural memory purely as a tale of horror well-told. After seeing Legend at the multi-plex with son, Leo, we Netflixed The Omega Man.

The film features fine performances by both Heston and Anthony Zerbe, in a role that was made for him, as the head of the bloodthirsty zombie tribe called The Family.

In the 2007 version of the story, the zombie vampires are more like wild animals. In The Omega Man, they’re demonic hippies, a bit of prescient bucking of the cultural tide, you might say, in 1971,  a time when hippie-sensibilities were entering the mainstream. Watch it these days and you see that it has become something more like meta-camp. Intentionally or not it is self-reflexive, with a low-intensity irony that reaches beyond its own time. How could the makers have known that hippies would be regarded with such disdain decades later?  

In The Omega Man, Heston is the seeming last non-zombie-hippie on Earth. The hippie parallel with The Family is nailed down in this scene, Heston alone in a movie theatre, where the film Woodstock is destined to play, over and over, for eternity:

Heston does a little more acting in this clip:

We hadn’t seen The Omega Man since seeing it in 1973 as a revival. Two years after its 1971 release it appeared as the opening entry in a Charlton Heston sci fi double feature at a drive-in theater in New Jersey. The other entry, Soylent Green, was in the 4th or 5th run of its own release cycle. (Or whatever playing at a drive-in in 1973 New Jersey constituted, marketing-wise. Last run more than likely.) Seeing these two films together at a drive-in those many years ago has stayed with us.   

Soylent Green was another, more respected, sci fi film that also benefited greatly by Heston’s presence. In this crime thriller Heston, set in a bleak future, utters one of the most famous lines in all of sci fi filmdom. And since it’s also one of the biggest spoilers in all of filmdom, we won’t play that clip here, out of respect for the line. (Warning: We’ll avoid the key spoilers here, but if you want to avoid them yourself, you’d want to steer clear of the clips available on YouTube. Treat yourself, see these movies whole.)  

Soylent Green was also significant, film-historically, as the last film appearance by Edward G. Robinson, himself a legend.

In this scene, in a bit of well-crafted cinematic suspense spinning, Robinson imparts, out-of-earshot, the secret of the green soylent to Heston, which propels him through the rest of the film. It’s an affecting scene, memorable for its imagery (both visual and aural) and for its emotion. Robinson was sick with the real-life affliction that would kill him. Pop culture-wise the poignancy of that moment will not be matched again until decades later, when Warren Zevon says good-bye to us on Letterman.

Lastly, there’s also the potentially laughable-but-for-Heston, Planet of the Apes.  

This was the earliest of his sci fi “trilogy” and with the funny ape makeup could easily have been a disaster if anyone but Heston played Taylor, the stranded astronaut. Pity poor Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter for having to undergo hours of make-up application as apes, but fer-cryin’-out-loud their mouths barely move. No matter, the gripping story, partly penned by master Rod Serling, and Heston, came to the rescue.

In this clip, Heston himself discusses the inside-baseball of Planet of the Apes and how it came to be, with Greg Kinnear:

We’ve seen commentary in the past that treated Heston’s sci-fi work as perhaps desperate career-salvaging hackery, a time-serving bridge until Hollywood could get to its attempt to revive itself via disaster films like Earthquake (in Sensaround!) and monster-budget war stories like Midway, where a whole lot of acting was not required.

It was anything but. Charlton Heston worked hard at his art, bringing stories to the screen and bringing his unique persona to them. Of this, the interview above hints, he was aware. And if you look at his IMDB entry, you’ll see he worked right up to a few years ago.

Just a note on the guns thing: in many main stream obits mentioning his late-life presidency of the National Rifle Association, you may detect a hint of a sneer, as if his interest in Constitutional protections offered by the 2nd Amendment somehow debased a fine Hollywood career. You might consider, though, that if Heston had been asked to write his own obit, he might put the NRA presidency first. For, indulging in a little lame heavenly fantasy here, we might imagine that he’s somewhere now right alongside the real Moses and Michelangelo, pointing to his pocket edition of the US Constitution and asking the Big Guy/Gal with impeccable and inimitable Hestonesque modulation:

“My God, what is it about ’shall not be infringed’ they don’t understand, dammit?”

Charlton Heston, 1924-2008

Charlton Heston, Dead at 84