Charlton Heston, Touch of Evil and "the method"
I’ve never been a fan of Charlton Heston. He was never a very good actor. And his macho gun-toting politics represents all that is worst inAmerica. But I do have a funny story about him. The Welles film, Touch of Evil, is one of my favorite films. I taught it for a number of years in my Politics and Film class at UNC Charlotte. Heston gave one of his best performances as Miguel “Mike” Sanchez, the presumed hero of the film. Sanchez, it turns, is a far more morally ambiguous character than one recognizes at first. Indeed, the one of the charms of the film is that one’ judgments of both Heston’s character and and the one played by Welles himself as well as one’s view of ethnic conflict itself are called into question in the film, One year, one of my best and favorite students in the class was… Continue reading