Charlton Heston gives up his gun

I first knew Charlton Heston from Planet of the Apes. Prior to the paradigm shift that was 1977's Star Wars, this was the science fiction movie. I probably first saw it as movie of the week on one of the networks, and then endlessly on Dialing for Dollars.

Later on I was astonished to discover that he was also in other movies. Earthquake, like Planet of the Apes, was a movie that was shown repeatedly on TV throughout my youth. (Keep in mind that when I was very young and had access to only four television stations - the local affiliates for ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS - any movie that was on TV more than two or three times represented a significant proportion of the total number of movies I had seen on TV ever.) Later came Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, and a handful of other films that I saw on one channel or another.

(I was a bit surprised while reviewing Heston's filmography to discover that he has been in relatively few roles - a mere 70 films and TV programs since 1968's Planet of the Apes. The only movie where I saw him in on the big screen was Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, where he was the Player King - a role Richard Dreyfuss has owned since Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead.)

Later Heston would establish himself as a darling of Right-wing politics, and would become president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), well-known for the "From my cold, dead hands" quote linked above. In his final years he has slipped away into Alzheimer's, exempting him from criticism and scorn for any positions he had held in his previous life.

And now he has died. But he leaves behind a body of work that includes some of the campiest performances put on celluloid. We'll all be doing Charlton Heston quotes for many years to come.