It was always clear where the actor stood
Charlton Heston was the last unironic movie star.
The male screen idols who rose to fame in the years following World War II all had wicked gleams in their eyes. Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Robert Ryan - to a man, they seemed to doubt the ruling complacency of the Eisenhower era, and by doubting, challenged it.
Not Chuck Heston. He embodied the troubled heroism of the epic movies of the 1950s and early '60s, but his persona was one of certitude, assurance. He never winked, rarely played outside his own sense of seriousness, and so he fell out of fashion as the counterculture made a camp joke of everything. But there are values to being an exclamation point when everyone else is acting like a question mark. Heston, who died this past Saturday at 84, was the straight arrow of his acting generation - easy to mock in passing but durable and fundamentally deserving of respect.
And he was Moses, for pity's sake - this strapping, steel-eyed goy from the Midwest played the Father of the Chosen People as if he himself had been the model for Michelangelo's statue. "The Ten Commandments" (1956) was Cecil B. DeMille's final blowout and as big as the legendary director could make it: three-and-a-half hours, 14,000 extras, a then-outrageous $13 million budget.
Yet Heston anchors the thing, not through great acting but obdurate, intelligent presence. Richard Harris once said of the actor, "Heston's the only man who could drop out of a cubic moon, he's so square." But who wants a hip Moses? Who wants to see a finger-popping El Cid, the medieval Spanish hero, in the 1961 epic of that name? Or a Michelangelo not capable of wrestling with "The Agony and the Ecstasy" (1965) of painting the Sistine Chapel?
Even in Orson Welles's masterful, supremely ironic "Touch of Evil" (1958), Heston is the moral principle from which the other, odder characters all deviate. That he pulled it off while essentially acting in brownface as a Mexican-American detective is even more remarkable.
Heston was often used in the role of designated historical figure; the studios knew he wouldn't camp it up and snigger behind his hand. He played William Clark of Lewis and Clark (in 1955's "The Far Horizons," with Donna Reed as a blue-eyed Sacajawea). He played Buffalo Bill Cody, John the Baptist, and President Andrew Jackson, the latter twice in four years. "Ben-Hur" (1959) was Heston's Oscar-winner and apotheosis - true to his convictions, the actor practiced for the famed chariot race by training with his four white horses for weeks in advance.
After that film, it seemed for a time as though pop culture might leave him behind. His performances as military men under siege in "55 Days at Peking" (1963) and "Major Dundee" (1965) are much smarter than they appear on the surface, though, and when the new genre of science-fiction apocalypse coalesced in the late 1960s, Heston became an old-style hero for the new paranoia.
"Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" It's one of the great lines in movie history, delicious precisely because Heston throws it down with such virile, outraged force. In "Planet of the Apes" (1968) and "The Omega Man" (1971) - the latter the second filming of Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" - the star seemed eminently believable as the last human in a world of simians and viral vampires. His characters in those movies embodied both where we'd gone wrong as a species and what might possibly save us, and in "Soylent Green" (1973) Heston became a sort of 21st century Moses, warning us that "Soylent green is people!" and leading us out of cannibalism.
The actor's real-life pronouncements were less goofy, more divisive. Heston's championing and eventual presidency of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003 meant that he had his assigned value in the modern culture wars. Most famously, he held up a musket at the 2000 NRA Convention and promised it would be taken from his hands only when they were cold and dead.
Insert your own morbid joke there if you're of that mind, but note that Heston was always more complicated than his public persona allowed. He was a registered Democrat for much of his life. His best screen performance was probably in one of his least-known films, as an illiterate cowhand in 1968's "Will Penny" - a finely judged portrait of an unnoticed man who locates something epic within himself.
When Michael Moore met Heston at his home in 2002's "Bowling for Columbine," intent on confronting the NRA head with photos of shooting victims, Moore won his point but lost the battle, because Heston was clearly an old, confused man unfairly ambushed. Moore ultimately made the mistake we all did: He assumed the star strode through life with the same charismatic, two-dimensional vigor as the heroes he played. That, of course, is why they call it acting. In truth, Charlton Heston was people. His skill lay in convincing us, for a few hours at a time, that he was something more.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/movies.
