“What does it matter what you say about people?” Marlene Dietrich asks at the end of that 1958 American masterpiece “Touch of Evil.” She’s talking about the dead cop Hank Quinlan, a mound of stilled flesh and lasting corruption given frightening life by the film’s director, Orson Welles. The man who brings him down is Vargas, the upright Dudley Do-Right Mexican detective with a paint-on tan. Lantern jaw set like a vise, this is of course Charlton Heston.
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Charlton Heston in trouble in “Planet of the Apes” (1968). More Photos »
Dietrich’s character probably had it right that it doesn’t really matter what we say about people, but in the wake of Mr. Heston’s death on Saturday, I would like to offer a few words about one of the last American movie stars. This seems particularly worthwhile because in the final decades of his life he had all but disappeared from the screen, making one of his only on-camera appearances in “Bowling for Columbine,” Michael Moore’s 2002 anti-gun feature. Mr. Moore shows up at Mr. Heston’s home and tries to shame this stooped and visibly frail old man for his stance on guns. The old man doesn’t engage Mr. Moore, just walks away, unfailingly polite to the end.
Welles called Mr. Heston “the nicest man to work with that ever lived in movies.” These two seemingly unlikely collaborators were brought together to star in a pulpy Universal Pictures project originally titled “Badge of Evil.” Mr. Heston thought that his co-star had been hired as the director (“any picture that Welles directs, I’ll make”), which prompted the studio quickly to sign Welles up for what would be his last Hollywood studio gig. Welles rewrote the screenplay and shot much of the film in Venice Beach in Los Angeles. History, alas, repeated itself, and he lost control of the film as he had on “The Magnificent Ambersons,” which is a different story from the one I want to tell. (A beautifully re-edited version was released in 1998 and is available on DVD.)
It was Welles who decided that Mr. Heston should play the role as a Mexican, partly as a way of building up what he considered to be an uninteresting character. (At first glance it may seem as if Welles failed.) Shortly after the film opens, Vargas and his delectable new American bride, Susan (Janet Leigh), kiss at the Mexican-American border, a passionate embrace that leads to a cataclysmic explosion and soon plunges the newlyweds into a phantasmagoria of sleaze, violence and very low camera angles. Vargas, a celebrity cop who has brought a case against a drug ring that’s about to go to trial in Mexico City, spends much of the story separated from Susan and circling Quinlan, a dirty American lawman.
In long shot and choking close up, Welles directs Mr. Heston brilliantly, making particularly memorable use of the actor’s physicality, his big, rangy body and the hard, clean right angles of his face. The ramrod straight, straight as an arrow Vargas, with his impossibly long and loping stride, could not look or register more different from Quinlan, an amorphous blob who all but rolls across the screen. Welles exploits Mr. Heston’s rigidity as a performer (and his American movie-star presence) for the character, using what in other films sometimes seemed like a limitation of craft and technique to the great advantage of the story’s texture and meaning. He turns Mr. Heston’s jutting jaw into the wagging finger of righteousness, deepening the film’s complex morality.
Mr. Heston starred in other notable films, of course, including Sam Peckinpah’s vicious 1965 western, “Major Dundee,” another story about border crossing and yet another ill-fated production taken away from its director. Mr. Heston plays the title character, a fanatical cavalry officer who, along with a motley posse, chases marauding Apaches into Mexico. Mr. Heston has his moments as Dundee — there’s something about his intensity that lends itself to obsessive characterizations — but he remains elusive, never becoming the Ahab that Peckinpah was after. As he had with Welles, Mr. Heston showed great loyalty to his troubled director and threatened to walk if the studio fired Peckinpah, who was drinking heavily throughout the production. Mr. Heston forfeited his salary in the bargain.
As much as I admire “Major Dundee,” my fondness for Mr. Heston can be traced back to the films I saw growing up, most important his great dystopian trilogy: “Planet of the Apes” (1968), “The Omega Man” (1971) and “Soylent Green” (1973). This was the Charlton Heston I first met and loved and the one I still love, the last man on Earth, the raging consciousness, the horrified hero. Few films thrilled me — or scared me — as much as “Soylent Green,” in which his character realizes that the stuff keeping the human race alive is made from other human beings: “Soylent Green is people!” By then, he had played Moses and saved an entire people from destruction. Things didn’t look good in “Soylent Green,” but somehow, I thought, surely Charlton Heston could save us.