[Marxism] WSWS: Charlton Heston and postwar American filmmaking

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charlton Heston and postwar American filmmaking
By Joanne Laurier and David Walsh
18 April 2008

Heston was best known for roles he played in some cases half a
century ago-Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's spectacular The Ten
Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur in the film of the same name (1959) and
Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965).

Given the generally repellent nature of the political stances he took
in the last decades of his life, Heston's name may arouse strongly
negative opinions and feelings.

His evolution was not an attractive one. The actor prominently and no
doubt sincerely identified himself both with the civil rights
movement in the early 1960s and, through the film roles he played
only a decade or so after the fall of the Nazi regime, with the
struggle against anti-Jewish prejudice.

By 1996, however, Heston had reached the point where he could pose
for a photo with the founder of the Council of Conservative Citizens,
the descendant of the White Citizens Council-the more respectable
ally of the ferociously racist and anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan. He
later served as president of the ultra-right National Rifle
Association. Whether or not he was mentally deteriorating by that
time or not, his end was undoubtedly ignominious.

A certain superficial "leftist" will simply make life easy for him or
herself by arguing that Heston was always "essentially" a
right-winger and there is nothing to be gained by looking at his life
and career. Such people never learn anything. The more challenging
task is to look at the evolution of individuals like Heston as the
product of objective historical and social processes. One has to make
an effort to explain the kind of artistic and social environment the
given figure encountered and worked within, the options that were
open to him or her, and the ones that were closed. People are
responsible, in the end, for what they do, but that responsibility is
historically conditioned and shaped.
---------------------------------------
Heston was never an extraordinarily expressive or subtle actor, 
but it would be a mistake to dismiss him. Even in later, more tired 
films of the 1970s and 1980s, he lent considerable weight to the roles. 
He tends to represent something more quantitative, so to speak, than 
qualitative. He is physically impressive, more so than anyone in the 
previous generation. The bulk and muscles seem to say something about 
America in the 1950s, for better or worse.
---------------------------------------

In From My Cold, Dead Hands: Charlton Heston and American Politics
(2006), author Emilie Raymond compares Heston's political shift in
the 1960s to the right to that of the neoconservatives, particularly
Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Martin Peretz and Gertrude
Himmelfarb. (The book's title comes from a Heston speech at a 2000
National Rifle Association convention, paraphrasing an NRA bumper
sticker: "I'll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead
hand.")

Contrary to Heston's autobiography in which he claims to have opposed
the Vietnam War, Raymond writes that the actor, whom she labels a
"visceral neoconservative," was an early proponent of the war after
having traveled to South Vietnam in 1966. She asserts that Heston
became alienated from the civil rights movement with King's
opposition to the war and his participation in antiwar marches in
1967. In general, it seems the increasing radicalization of the
anti-war and civil rights movements, with the accompanying inevitable
clashes with police and authorities, disturbed and appalled Heston.

In 1968, following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Heston
supported gun control-by the 1980s, he was opposing affirmative
action from the right and defending gun ownership as some fundamental
social principle. He voted for Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential
elections (although he later denounced Nixon in his autobiography),
shunning the Democratic nominee, George McGovern and saying he was
"sick to death of the doom-watchers and the naysayers. This is a good
country."

Between 1966 and 1976, Heston's roles were no longer in epic films,
which featured larger-than-life, heroic characters. On the contrary,
Hollywood was making a different type of movie, such as the acclaimed
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975, Milos Forman), in which the
vulnerable anti-hero (played by Jack Nicholson in that film) takes
center stage. Heston hated the "counterculture" or any real or
imagined challenge to bourgeois American values. His ire was
especially directed at films like Cuckoo's Nest that depicted
society's "crazies" as being more rational and legitimate than
officially sanctioned authority.

According to Raymond: "The movie roles that he accepted and rejected
during the 1960s and 1970s reflected his dissatisfaction with the
political and cultural radicalism that seemed to be gaining infinite
momentum. By retaining the trademark characteristics of masculinity,
individuality, and responsibility that he had presented to the public
in the 1950s, Heston demonstrated that he still preferred traditional
values. Even in the futuristic Planet of the Apes (1968), in which he
launched himself as a modern-day action hero, he displayed this
conventionalism."

This is no doubt true from the point of view of Heston's wishes;
however, he or at least his films did not go untouched by the changed
mood in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even as he was
politically hostile to the radicalization. Cracks in America's
apparent invincibility emerged, and Heston's characters inevitably
showed signs of the process. Considerable anxiety and even
apocalyptic sentiments find expression in Planet of the Apes (1968,
Franklin Schaffner) and its sequel (Beneath the Planet of the Apes,
1970, Ted Post), The Omega Man (1971, Boris Sagal), Skyjacked (1972,
John Guillermin), Soylent Green (1973, Richard Fleischer), Earthquake
(1974, Mark Robson) and Two-Minute Warning (1976, Larry Peerce).

All was not well in the US, after all. But this did not apparently
make Heston think more critically about American society. On the
contrary, he was well on his way toward the right.

In 1976, he made The Battle of Midway, a patriotic war film
celebrating the American victory over the Japanese at the Battle of
Midway, playing the most valiant-and the only fictional-character in
the movie.

Near the end of Heston's reign at SAG in 1971, a group of actors
organized to shift the union to the left in an effort dubbed the
Revolution of '73. Heston resigned from the union's board in 1975,
reasoning that it had "changed radically recently, and I've become a
surly curmudgeon, bitching about policies they go ahead and vote for
anyway."

As Heston's connection with the Reagan administration deepened, his
relationship with the SAG leadership became increasingly strained.
Heston took particular offense at Ed Asner, the Guild's president at
the time and a vocal opponent of the administration. Asner had
picketed on behalf of the air traffic controllers, a strike provoked
by Reagan and a seminal conflict whose defeat ushered in a period of
union-busting.

When Asner set out to merge the actors' union with the Screen Extras
Guild-in light of recent mergers such as the one between the
Coca-Cola Company and Columbia Pictures-he had a public confrontation
with Heston, whom he called a Reagan "stooge."

It was Asner's opposition to Reagan for aiding the El Salvador
government in suppressing the country's guerilla movement that
intensified the feud between the two actors. Heston founded Actors
Working for an Actors Guild (AWAG) to attempt to block the merger
proposal between SAG and the Screen Extras Guild, an action that
proved successful. In 1986, several thousand Guild members voted to
censure Heston for his "antiunion" activities.

During the 1980s, Heston worked with various religious and right-wing
groups, as well as large corporations. When Anheuser-Bush Brewery
hired him as a spokesperson, Heston absurdly told television viewers
that beer has "figured prominently throughout our nation's history,"
from its presence on the Mayflower to its swilling by the nation's
founding fathers.

Heston opposed abortion and delivered the introduction to a 1987
"pro-life" documentary called Eclipse of Reason that focuses on
late-term abortions. He was honored by both Bush administrations and
supported the first Gulf War in 1991, as well as the invasions of
Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. At the end of his life, he was
a largely discredited and pitiable individual, as evidenced in
Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine.

A significant figure in American filmmaking for two decades, Heston
made a certain mark, but not the most illuminating or enduring.
Artists have the obligation not only to be conscientious, but to
think about their world and society and bring that to bear on their
artistic efforts. There is too much in Heston that is labored,
unthought through and contrived. He attached himself far too
thoroughly and uncritically to a society riven by contradictions.
Heston thought, like many others, that American society was a great
success story that would go on forever. The truth helped prove his
undoing.

FULL:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/apr2008/hest-a18.shtml


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