[Ed. note: I know I’m a couple weeks late for the funeral and pretty much the entire blogosphere has already had its say on the late actor Charlton Heston, but I feel I would be highly remiss if I didn’t recognize his passing here in my little corner of the InterWebs. So just imagine that it’s two weeks ago and this is current news, okay?]

One of the great treasures of my childhood was the time I spent watching old movies on television with my mom. I’m thinking in particular of the days before the home video revolution, when the viewer actually had very little control over the viewing experience. If you didn’t like whatever was on KSL’s Big Money Movie that day, you found something else to do. And if you did like the film, you really had to pay attention and savor it because there was no telling when it might air again.

I think that’s probably the biggest difference between The Way Things Used to Be and the on-demand world we now enjoy, the way we take it for granted that you can watch the same flick over and over, whenever you feel like it. When I was a kid, we just didn’t have that luxury, and I honestly think movies meant more to film lovers back then because of the relative scarcity of any given title.

There were, however, three pictures that you could count on seeing pretty regularly, because they always aired at least once a year, usually around holidays: The Wizard of Oz, Ben-Hur, and The Ten Commandments. As it happened, my mom loved all three of them, and, in the case of the two Heston films, could even recall seeing them on the big screen when they were new. (Somewhere down in the Bennion Archives, I have the Ben-Hur souvenir program that she bought in the lobby of the late, lamented Villa Theatre way back in 1959.) Squashing these epic movies down into the confines of a 24-inch TV screen robbed them of much of their grandeur, of course, but I didn’t fully understand that at the time. I thought they were neat, partly because watching them was an annual tradition, partly because my mom was so enthusiastic about them and my early tastes were heavily influenced by hers, but mostly because I liked Charlton Heston, who died April 5th at the age of 84.

I don’t think it’s unfair to note that he had a limited range as an actor, but the one thing he did have going for him was an unshakable air of sincerity and dignity. He spent a good part of his career wearing very little — loincloths, togas, and the like — and many of his best-known films are, let’s face it, rather silly. (Ben-Hur is a notable exception; that’s a great movie, even after the passage of so much time. I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen myself a few years ago, an experience I highly recommend if you get the chance.) Planet of the Apes beats us over the head with its indictments of racism and the human penchant for violence; Soylent Green has some interesting ideas and haunting images (the throngs of street people being cleared with the bulldozer and Edward G. Robinson’s suicide booth linger in my memory), but is generally overwrought; and The Omega Man is… well, it’s entertaining enough, but it could never have been anything but a cult classic with its afro’d vampires and ham-fisted Christ symbolism. Even The Ten Commandments is a ridiculous film when you really look at it, stagey and brimming over with scenery-chewing performances and purple dialogue. But all of these films somehow work; they grab your attention and, at least for the time that they’re on screen, you really buy into their worlds. I attribute that to their one common element: Charlton Heston.*

Heston had a way of making even the preachiest, clunkiest lines sound authoritative, if not exactly realistic. I can’t imagine any other actor saying “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” or pretty much any of Moses’ lines without injecting some self-conscious irony or embarrassment or just plain self-consciousness into the delivery. Certainly there’s nobody in today’s generation of actors who could pull off The Ten Commandments as it was written in 1956; they’d have to play Moses as angsty and conflicted, filled with doubts about his destiny. While such a performance might make for a more human Moses, or a more modern Moses, I think it would also drain the character of the elemental strength that Heston brought to him. Heston’s Moses has no doubt, which is why he could make those grand pronouncements about the God of Abraham and letting his people go and such, and have them sound portentous instead of laughable.

Similarly, Heston’s air of inherent dignity is what drives Planet of the Apes; it’s what makes his character Taylor sympathetic rather than silly as he’s scrabbling around a cage filled with dirty straw, and it’s what makes his anguish in the film’s shocking coda so heart-wrenching. Because even in the loincloth, surrounded by people in rubber chimpanzee suits, Heston retains an aura of civilization and a bedrock conviction that the human species cannot be as debased as the ape characters keep asserting. It makes his real-life affliction with Alzheimer’s Disease, which destroys a person’s dignity before taking their life, all the more sad and ironic.

In recent years, Heston’s politics and especially his affiliation with the National Rifle Association have garnered more attention than his filmography, and his outspoken conservative views have soured some peoples’ opinion of him. None of that matters a bit to me. Even though I’m pretty sure Chuck and I wouldn’t have seen eye to eye on a lot of issues — probably most issues, actually — it doesn’t diminish in the least the affection I have for those great old movies I grew up watching with my mom, or the admiration I’ve always felt for him personally. Moreover, I believe Heston was, above all else, a gracious gentleman who wouldn’t have picked a fight simply because the person sitting across from him had a different opinion. There aren’t many of his generation left, good old-fashioned larger-than-life movie stars from the time when actors really were stars and not merely famous thespians, and each one who leaves us now is a profound loss. I doubt we’ll ever see their kind again…

* (Some of the credit for how well The Ten Commandments works must also go to Yul Brynner, a guy whose quiet awesomeness is never sufficiently acknowledged by the modern-day guardians of hip. But that’s another entry…)