Charlton Heston is dead at the age of 84. Where to begin?
You could fill volumes writing on Heston, focusing solely on single aspects of his career: His turn from liberalism to rabid right-wing nuttiness, his iconic roles in stolid fifties epics like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, his later decline into camp with cheesetastic seventies fare like The Omega Man, Earthquake and Airport 75.
He could be a superb, surprisingly nuanced character actor, as in his film debut, William Dieterle's underrated Dark City, or William Wyler's The Big Country, or especially Sam Peckinpah's almost-great Major Dundee. He was a fine comic performer, too, a talent best utilized by Richard Lester in his sublime The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers.
He was exactly the outsized presence needed for terrific movies like The Naked Jungle and El Cid, and if he's the weakest link in Orson Welles' Touch Of Evil, he still gets a pass, since he had a hand in getting Welles the job. And don't even get me started on Planet Of The Apes, or we'll be here all day.
The point is, whatever the vehicle, when the man was on screen, you couldn't help but watch him. He was one of the last by-God Movie Stars still working into the twenty-first century, and he'll be dearly missed.
