Charlton Heston, 1923 – 2008.

Charlton Heston has passed away at the age of 84.

I’ve always liked Heston, even when I haven’t liked his acting. He starred in three of the biggest Bible epics of the Bible-epic era, namely The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965); and then he starred in three of the biggest doom-and-gloom sci-fi movies of the doom-and-gloom era, namely Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973).

I wonder sometimes if Heston’s performances seemed as funny to people in his day as they seem to us now. I remember watching Planet of the Apes on the big screen in the early ’90s with an audience that laughed uproariously throughout the film. And the scene in The Greatest Story Ever Told where Heston, as John the Baptist, defiantly tries to force-baptize the soldiers that have come to arrest him is a strikingly ridiculous moment in an otherwise sombre film.

Certainly it was almost impossible to watch him in his more recent films without laughing — and at times, at least, he seemed to be in on the joke.

His cameo in True Lies (1994), as Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s cranky, eyepatch-wearing boss, was hilarious — and in his autobiography, Heston claimed that director James Cameron cast him in the role because Heston, according to Cameron, was the only actor who could convincingly intimidate Schwarzenegger.

I also have very fond memories of seeing Alaska (1996), directed by Heston’s son Fraser, with my sister Michelle. If memory serves, there is a moment in that children’s film where Heston is immobilized by a bear, and after the bear scampers off, Heston yells “Dammit!”, and then the film cuts to a more distant angle, and Heston yells “Dammit!” again, and then the film cuts to an even more distant angle, and Heston yells “Dammit!” all over again. My sister and I could not help but laugh.

And as bad as a movie like Town & Country (2001) might have been, I did enjoy his cameo, in which — as I put it in my review — “he bravely sends up his image as a psychotic gun-toting homophobe.”

And yet, for all the self-parody, Heston was still capable of good acting, even in his later years. His small role as the Player King in Kenneth Branagh‘s Hamlet (1996) was easily one of the best things about that film — and it is remarkable how Heston, known for his bombast in other roles, showed “a real aptitude for Shakespeare’s language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material,” as Paul Clark at The Screengrab puts it, while Branagh filled much of the rest of the film with his own brand of bombast.

The IMDb lists over 120 credits in Heston’s filmography — and that’s not counting the times he played himself. Even if we bracket off all the bad films, there are still quite a few good ones that I need to see. Come to think of it, it was only since starting my blog three years ago that I got around to seeing classic Heston films like The Big Country (1958), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and The Four Musketeers (1974), for example.

I also happened to watch El Cid (1961) for the first time just a couple months ago, and I was pretty impressed by the sheer scale of it all, from the melodramatic performances to the battle scenes with the seemingly literal cast of thousands. And even there, we find humour; in the bonus features, it is revealed that Heston refused to look at Sophia Loren more than he had to — even during their love scenes — because he didn’t like her breath. If you watch the film with that in mind, certain scenes become more subtly amusing than you might have expected. And Heston, to his credit, admits in the making-of documentary that he probably wasn’t as fair to Loren as he could have been.

I had to stop and think for a second how I should write that last sentence; because Heston is no longer with us, I had to choose between relegating him to the past tense and using the present tense in a way that made sense. Heston himself is gone, but his performances, including the interviews he gave, live on; those peformances will have to do for now, and hopefully we will get to see the man himself again some day. Rest in peace, Chuck.

APR 7 UPDATE: CT Movies editor Mark Moring reminds me that I reviewed the book and video versions of Charlton Heston Presents the Bible (1993) for BC Christian News nine years ago.