Sunday, April 06, 2008

Charlton Heston is Dead...

An Axiom of the Cinema passes on.

I wonder if they can detach that old musket from his hands in time for the wake?

Oh that was cruel, but a variant of it will be Letterman's opening gag tomorrow night so think of it as preview....

I mock Heston, he was a truly a third rate actor with the stony charisma of fine statuary lovingly polished, he was a hopeless character player (any time he was to do an accent, watch out!) but for all that he is literally in some ten or eleven movies I love. Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, the 10 Commandments, Ben Hur, Soylent Green, Skyjacked, Airport '75, Midway, Earthquake, 55 Days at Peking, Khartoum, The Naked Jungle...its a long list believe me.
Never did such a limited talent do so much so well.
And what the hell, he did right by Orson Welles insisting that the Sifu should direct "Touch of Evil", that alone should get him marked down in the "book of life".
Heston may have been a gun-worshipper but he was loyal to his friends and he stuck his neck out good and far on behalf of civil rights when the rest of Hollywood was muttering on the sidelines.

He will be missed.

I'd conclude with the usual bromides about Heston being the last of an extinct breed but honestly he is naught but the Iron King for such ambitious second raters as Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzeneger.

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