Tha Agony and the Ecstasy: One great man to another

Big Hollywood’s TCM Pick of the Day for Sunday is The Agony and the Ecstasy, just more Charlton Heston being great playing a great man. Heston had such a body of work that it’s difficult to cover it all.

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.