Whatever you thought of his politics (which over the course of his career covered a lot of self-contradictory ground) or his movies (ditto), few deaths this past year left a bigger crater in movie history than Charlton Heston's As Anthony Giardina writes in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, "Heston was an actor about whom what we say, now and forever, is likely to be determined by the huge, looming bookends of his career. Barely out of his 20s, he put on a beard, dyed his hair gray and descended Mount Sinai carrying the tablets in The Ten Commandments (1956). Some 40 years later, Heston carried a different set of tablets for the N.R.A., extolling its members’ rights with a passion that edged close to zealotry. Lost somewhere in all of this was the subtler, more reflective man who emerged in the 1960s when Heston, after the back-to-back successes of Ben Hur and El Cid, made a series of smaller films critical of the traditional male ethos, an ethos he himself had pretty much come to embody. 'Our time is oriented to the loser,' Heston wrote in his diaries in 1965, and though he had, up to that time, almost invariably played winners, he seemed to know in his actor’s bones that the true riches were to be found playing the sorts of antiheroes then dominating the movies." Heston had a special affection for his role in the 1968 Western Will Penny, in which he played a middle-aged, illiterate cowboy facing the end of his way of life with nothing to look forward to but the closing of the frontier and Donald Pleasance as the head of the local welcome wagon. Heston's performance in that movie is very fine, but there was something wasted when Heston, with his American eagle profile and embodiment of the can-do spirit, played a real loser, a mere mortal. That's why his most fruitful exploration of that terrain was probably in the title role of Sam Peckinpah's 1965 cavalry Western and Vietnam allegory, Major Dundee. Giardina describes Dundee, whose rash and remorseless decision to track down a renegade Apache and his followers smacks of both honorable duty and an ambitious, frustrated man's grab for glory, as "a kind of Donald Rumsfeld of the Civil War, but a Rumsfeld suffering an identity crisis." Peckinpah clearly pushed Heston hard to deliver the performance he wanted, and it makes sense that, in the heat of the battle to get the picture made, Heston offered to fork over his entire salary to the studio in exchange for them backing off from their decision to fire the director. (To his eternal astonishment, they took him up on it.) But it also makes sense that he never worked with Peckinpah again, though it's tantalizing to imagine him as Peckinpah's Pat Garrett.



Another, closer and more personal glimpse of Heston comes from Nicholas A. Salerno, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University, who has written a brief remembrance of how he came to make Heston's acquaintance through a shared passion for Shakespeare. In the 1970s, the prof screened for his students the Joseph Manckiewicz movie version of Julius Caesar, with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony, David Bradley's film of a student production made in 1950 with Heston in the role, and a 1970 film, directed by Stuart Burge, in which Heston reprised the role of Marc Antony. "In both those films, a near-nude Heston was shown running the race on the Feast of the Lupercal. A hunk when he ran for Bradley, the somewhat overweight Heston running for Burge was not necessarily a pleasant sight." But Salerno managed to pull it together enough to ask Heston for permission to show his class a 16-mm. film of the 1972 Antony and Cleopatra, which Heston directed and starred in. ("This time around," he assures us, "Heston's more mature body was better suited to Shakespeare's mature Antony than it had been to the younger Antony in the Burge film.") Heston "did me one better. He called me with a generous offer: He would send his personal 35-millimeter print and come with it for a question-and-answer session with my class -- if I could find a way to screen the print. Enter Dan Harkins, the owner then of a few local movie theaters, now the emperor of a chain of theaters crossing state boundaries. He had been a student in the first film class I taught. All it took was a phone call: Harkins offered me his Valley Art Theatre in Tempe free of charge. The print came by courier a few days before Heston's scheduled arrival. My students packed the theater. But would Heston really turn up? On Nov. 1, 1973, I was pacing in front of the Valley Art, waiting, I suppose, for Moses to drive up in a stretch limo, when I spotted Heston walking down Mill Avenue. He'd had his driver let him off a few blocks away, so he could get a feel for Tempe." It would be the first of a number of run-ins that Salerno would have with a man he found to be "a lover and thoughtful interpreter" of Shakespeare as well as "gentlemanly, generous with his time, willing -- nay, eager -- to talk with my students." Heston would invite Salerno to see his 1975 production of Macbeth with Vanessa Redgrave and sometimes ask his opinion of scripts. He also attended a one-man show Heston gave where he showed clips from his movies and took questions from the audience, an evening where the "most moving moment was his emotional retelling of Eddie Robinson's death scene in Soylent Green; both actors knew that Robinson was dying in real life and that they were immortalizing their last Earthly goodbyes on film." Salerno adds that "By the time all the NRA stuff made the news, we had gone our separate ways," and he mentions that in all his conversations with Heston, he managed to avoid the subject of politics. You learn this stuff on the road to tenure.