Charlton Heston: The Epic Man

By RICHARD CORLISS

Nobody wanted to see Charlton Heston in the business suit or polo shirt that other stars of the '50s and '60s wore. The present was too puny a place to confine him. But put him in a toga or a military uniform from any millennium, or strip him to the waist to reveal that finely muscled torso, then let his tense, intense baritone voice articulate a noble notion, and you had Hollywood's ideal of Mensa beefcake. In the era of the movie epic, he was the iconic hero, adding to these films millions in revenue, plenty of muscle and 10 IQ points. The movie Heston was almost his own species: Epic Man.

Heston, who died April 5 at 84, was unique among Hollywood stars. Of no other actor could you say, He was born to play Moses, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Michelangelo. At the very moment Marlon Brando was freeing film-acting from good manners, Heston proved there was thrilling life in the endangered tradition of speaking well and looking great. And when he wasn't the movies' avatar of antique glory, he was our emissary to the future: the last man on earth in two dystopian science-fiction films, Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. Heston was the alpha and omega of movie manhood--our civilized ancestor, our elevated destiny.

He was born John Carter, in Evanston, Ill.; he took his stage name from his mother's and stepfather's surnames. At Northwestern University, he appeared in a student film of Peer Gynt, and by 1950 he had made his way to Hollywood. Director Cecil B. DeMille immediately saw the actor's appeal, casting him in The Greatest Show on Earth, then giving him the role of Moses in The Ten Commandments. At 32, Heston passed as the old patriarch and aced the movie's crucial scene: Moses holding his staff above his head, parting the waters of the Red Sea and commanding the Israelites to walk on through.

Ben-Hur confirmed Heston's status as epic hero; it won 11 Oscars (including one for Heston as Best Actor). Truth to tell, Ben-Hur was long and logy, but it got the actor his finest role in his best film. El Cid is up there with Lawrence of Arabia in the epic empyrean: passionate, eloquent, with a visual and emotional grandeur. As the 11th century soldier seeking peace with Spain's large Muslim minority, Heston gave heroic heft to a pacifist warrior. At the end, the Cid, close to death, orders that his body be strapped to his horse and carried out to battle so that his presence will put fear into the enemy--a ripe metaphor for the enduring power of star quality.

As the epic form waned, Heston found new life as the ultimate loner, the only human among mutant species, in Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. "Damn you all to hell!" he cried in Planet, as if he were Moses smashing the commandments, enraged by the weakness of humanity.

That mood eventually settled on Heston. In the '60s he marched with Martin Luther King Jr., and after Robert Kennedy's death, he called for gun control. But like many young liberals, he aged into conservatism. In the '80s he became a prime spokesman for right-wing causes and in 1998 the president of the National Rifle Association (NRA). At the 2000 NRA convention, he invoked his own Moses, hoisting a rifle above his head and proclaiming that presidential candidate Al Gore could remove the gun only by prying it "from my cold, dead hands."

Heston had a final great role to play. In 2002 he announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer's-like symptoms and, in a last burst of eloquence, declared, "I must reconcile courage and surrender in equal measure." Not even a movie hero can write a happy ending to his own life, but maybe in the enveloping vagueness, Heston had one. With him when he died was Lydia Clarke Heston, his wife of 64 years.

From start to finish, Heston was a grand, ornery anachronism, the sinewy symbol of a time when Hollywood took itself seriously, when heroes came from history books, not comic books. Epics like Ben-Hur or El Cid simply couldn't be made today, in part because popular culture has changed as much as political fashion. But mainly because there's no one remotely like Charlton Heston to infuse the form with his stature, fire and guts.