THE ALPHA AND OMEGA MAN
Charlton Heston’s passing marks the end of Hollywood masculinity
BY JARRET KEENE
After John Wayne died in 1979, there were few genuinely tough Hollywood leading men left standing. Steve McQueen died a year later, and no one — not even the very talented Charles Bronson — could inhabit the role of unforced, aging cinematic machismo. Clint Eastwood still endures as a paradigm of rugged manhood, sure, but his wildly uneven work as an actor and director —Firefox, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — makes The Green Berets and The Conqueror look like epic accomplishments. For a quarter century, filmgoers have settled for second-tier icons like (barf!) Bruce Willis, (argh!) Arnold Schwarzenegger and (yuck!) George Clooney, none of who can hold a candle to Wayne.
Charlton Heston came the closest, despite being ambushed by anti-gun liberals like documentary filmmaker Michael Moore and Clooney, who each enjoyed picking on a person suffering from Alzheimer’s for the simple reason that he defended gun rights. Bowling for Columbine remains a fascinating and savvy film but, like everything he does, Moore shoots himself in the foot by putting down others who don’t share his left-wing views. The scene in which he torments the memory-failing Heston in his own home by holding up a picture of a girl murdered by gun violence turns this film critic’s stomach — especially upon learning how Moore manipulated his footage to make it seem as if Heston had uttered the “from my cold, dead hands” line in Columbine, Colorado, shortly after the massacre. (For more of Moore’s lies, visit MooreExposed.com.)
Clooney, another talented yet tormented soul, once cracked a joke about Heston repeatedly announcing he had Alzheimer’s (not funny), then refused to apologize, citing Heston’s NRA affiliation as a justification for the insult. Moses responded like a gentleman: “It just goes to show that sometimes class does skip a generation.”
Too often, talent has skipped a generation as well. And one of the ironies about Heston is that his talent was so incredible as to salvage and thematically complicate a trio of the most politically liberal science-fiction films of the Vietnam era: Planet of the Apes (1968), Soylent Green (1972) and The Omega Man (1973). Thanks to Heston’s performances, these are three of the most butt-kicking, left-leaning action movies ever and deserve to be watched before Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments or anything else.
Although released the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s visually spellbinding 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes enjoyed box-office status and stands as the superior work in terms of pure storytelling (with a script credit by Twilight Zone-creator Rod Serling). Based on an unreadable novel by French author Pierre Boulle, Apes stars Heston as crash-landed astronaut Taylor who finds himself captured by apes who can talk and have developed their own rigid class system among chimps, gorillas and orangutans. In essence a metaphor about racism, Apes is at once thought-provoking and fun as hell, especially when Taylor, caught in a net, sneers the now acid-drenched line: “Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”
Soylent Green, meanwhile, is a dystopian crime narrative set in the year 2022. Heston plays Robert Thorn, a New York City cop investigating the murder of a member of Soylent Corporation’s board of directors. The case leads him to grisly discovery about the food monolith’s processed rations that feed more than half of the planet’s population. In a world succumbing to overpopulation, global warming and rampant poverty, Thorn begins to unravel the connection between big government and big business in devastating fashion. While Soylent Green clearly influenced environmental hysteria, its vision of a Third World America is as prescient as ever. Thorn’s cramped one-room apartment, which he must step over the homeless to reach, is, despite Giuliani’s efforts, a reality.
Finally, The Omega Man, in which Heston plays the last man on a post-apocalyptic, plague-ravaged earth fighting for his life against The Family, a cult of albino, plague-resistant mutants. Until the last man stumbles upon a small group of human survivors and eventually soul-kisses a black lady. Sure, the film came out in ’73, but that still makes it pretty ballsy. The way in which the film aligns the Manson-like antics of The Family with the late-20th-century Christian Evangelical movement is pretty daring, too.
Whether combating racism, or uncovering corporate malfeasance or keeping crazy death-cults at bay, Heston does it with macho yet classy verve. (It’s something today’s soft Hollywood guys could stand to learn from.) There will never be another film actor like him.
