Word: ben-hur
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At Dartmouth, another “Green Key Weekend” looms. The usual plan of attack for the three-day weekend includes a block party at Phi Delta Alpha fraternity and a lawn party at Alpha Delta. There used to be chariot races (just like in Ben-Hur!), but those were banned in the mid-1980s...
...races aren't just 200 miles of left turns; the tracks are designed as crazy theme-park rides, with 360 loops, chasm-wide broken tracks, roads that wind around mountains and across rivers. The autos skid sideways and fly over other cars on stilts. In a reference to the Ben-Hur chariot race, they brandish hubcap spear hooks to disable their opponent's vehicle. And, since the rallies take place in Virtual World, there's no fretting about the waste of fuel. All of Speed Racer is a holiday not only from the gas tax, but from...
Heston, who died April 5 at 84, was unique among Hollywood stars. Of no other actor could you say, He was born to play Moses, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Michelangelo. At the very moment Marlon Brando was freeing film-acting from good manners, Heston proved there was thrilling life in the endangered tradition of speaking well and looking great. And when he wasn't the movies' avatar of antique glory, he was our emissary to the future: the last man on earth in two dystopian science-fiction films, Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. Heston was the alpha...
...Ben-Hur confirmed Heston's status as epic hero; it won 11 Oscars (including one for Heston as Best Actor). Truth to tell, Ben-Hur was long and logy, but it got the actor his finest role in his best film. El Cid is up there with Lawrence of Arabia in the epic empyrean: passionate, eloquent, with a visual and emotional grandeur. As the 11th century soldier seeking peace with Spain's large Muslim minority, Heston gave heroic heft to a pacifist warrior. At the end, the Cid, close to death, orders that his body be strapped to his horse...
From start to finish, Heston was a grand, ornery anachronism, the sinewy symbol of a time when Hollywood took itself seriously, when heroes came from history books, not comic books. Epics like Ben-Hur or El Cid simply couldn't be made today, in part because popular culture has changed as much as political fashion. But mainly because there's no one remotely like Charlton Heston to infuse the form with his stature, fire and guts...