The stars (1962)

Two aspects of Moses as conceived by Heston and director Cecil B. DeMille CHARLTON HESTON Trusty, brave, clean and reverent At first, everyone thought Charlton Heston was underacting. Reviewing his first film, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times found in him "a quiet but assertive magnetism, a youthful dignity." Three years later, Variety was noting that one of his performances was "forthright, steelyeyed" and that "he has a superb manner of underplaying through voice and a minimum of gestures." Then came the string of spectacles in super-duper scope, The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments, The Big Country, Ben-Hur, El Cid, and all of a sudden it began occurring to people that Heston was acting with all the passion at his command, that the curiously lifeless gestures and the general stiffness of his demeanor were about all he could manage and that, oddly, they were priceless commodities. He in no way interfered with the expensive scenery, the mobs of people, the general air of expensive expansiveness that are the real stars of a movie spectacle. In addition, he has the physical stature and presence not to be overwhelmed by a film of huge scope. He is, as someone suggested, the Francis X. Bushman of his time. Which is not quite fair to Heston. For he is a serious, sincere and intelligent individual who has repeatedly made financial sacrifices in order to broaden his acting range. He accepted considerably less than his usual fee in order to work under Orson Welles' direction in Touch of Evil, a small, gamey, superbly sadistic murder melodrama; he attempted a dreadful Broadway play, The Juggler, in order to work under Laurence Olivier's direction. "I don't want to get stuck doing one thing," he has said. "Once the public gets you pegged you can't escape." Heston claims he has wanted to act since he was five years old and played Santa Claus in a school production. He studied theater at Northwestern University and, while there, appeared in a remarkable 16-mm. film of Julius Caesar which he and his fellow students shot in and around Chicago — of all places. A few parts on Broadway in the late forties led directly to Hollywood and film stardom. It may be that he is too intelligent to do the kind of subtle, emotional acting that is the essence of good screen work. In any event, it is his misfortune to be rather noble in appearance and, hence, to be a natural choice for roles requiring an aristocratic bearing. He himself has said that some actors seem to have faces that belong to certain historical eras. William Holden, he says, is the perfect modern American, Henry Fonda the perfect antebellum American. Bogart the urban American. And what is Heston's historical era? "Apparently somewhere before Christ," he says a little sadly. 267