Charlton Heston, 1923-2008
April 6, 2008

He was Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), he was Ben-Hur (1959), he was El Cid (1961), he was Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), he was John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), he was Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers (1973) and he was even the last man on Earth a couple of times (in 1968’s Planet of the Apesand again a couple of years later in 1971’s The Omega Man), but for me, Charlton Heston will always be the guy who took on a 20-mile-long column of killer army ants in 1954’s The Naked Jungle.

Heston died on Saturday night at the age of 84.

The Naked Jungle--one of about a dozen of so that Heston made before he became a superstar by parting The Red Sea in The Ten Commandments--finds the man portraying Christopher Leiningen, an American in South America who owns a successful cocoa plantation. In his mid-30s, Leiningen hasn’t much experience in the way of women, so he’s not all that charming when his mail-order wife Eleanor Parker arrives. The movie follows a standard romance-on-the-fringes-of-civilization storyline until the last half-hour, when the Marabunta--a phalanx of army ants--arrives to systematically eat up his plantation.

What I didn’t understand when I first saw the movie on TV when I was a kid was that the relentless, termite-like ants were a metaphor for the instability and growing ferociousness of marital discord. Those ants were an portentous sign that all parties involved have got to give it their all to make things work, to grow, to be a participant in life’s game. If one doesn’t play along, one will be consumed by the ever-encroaching natural dangers that are always advancing forward. (How’s that for a teenage look at the benefits of marriage!?!) This is something that dawned on my in subsequent viewings as I got a little older--and I can also say that Heston, who was sorta stiff in the movie’s first half, played it with magnificent physicality when it came time to confront the ants, who make it all the way up to his front door before turning away. “Stay at the house,” Charlton Heston tells Parker at the outset of the man vs. insect clash. “Civilization ends there.”

And it was to nearly end again and again and again over the course of Heston’s film career. But more times than not, he usually managed to save said civilization by the end of the day (or the end credit crawl--which ever came first). And that’s something.

Posted by Laurence Lerman on April 6, 2008 | Comments (1)