Whatever you thought of his politics (which over the course of his career covered a lot of self-contradictory ground) or his movies (ditto), few deaths this past year left a bigger crater in movie history than Charlton Heston's As Anthony Giardina writes in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, "Heston was an actor about whom what we say, now and forever, is likely to be determined by the huge, looming bookends of his career. Barely out of his 20s, he put on a beard, dyed his hair gray and descended Mount Sinai carrying the tablets in The Ten Commandments (1956). Some 40 years later, Heston carried a different set of tablets for the N.R.A., extolling its members’ rights with a passion that edged close to zealotry. Lost somewhere in all of this was the subtler, more reflective man who emerged in the 1960s when Heston, after the back-to-back successes of Ben Hur and El Cid, made a series of smaller films critical of the traditional male ethos, an ethos he himself had pretty much come to embody. 'Our time is oriented to the loser,' Heston wrote in his diaries in 1965, and though he had, up to that time, almost invariably played winners, he seemed to know in his actor’s bones that the true riches were to be found playing the sorts of antiheroes then dominating the movies." Heston had a special affection for his role in the 1968 Western Will Penny, in which he played a middle-aged, illiterate cowboy facing the end of his way of life with nothing to look forward to but the closing of the frontier and Donald Pleasance as the head of the local welcome wagon. Heston's performance in that movie is very fine, but there was something wasted when Heston, with his American eagle profile and embodiment of the can-do spirit, played a real loser, a mere mortal. That's why his most fruitful exploration of that terrain was probably in the title role of Sam Peckinpah's 1965 cavalry Western and Vietnam allegory, Major Dundee.
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