Charlton Heston Can't Take It With Him, But Man, If He Could...
UPDATE (11:31am): Looks like we've been pap'd! If only Ashton Kutcher could've come up with a ruse this elaborate, maybe Pop Fiction wouldn't have been unceremoniously dumped after 3 episodes. Instead, we got Audrina Patridge tattoos! Oh well, it was fun while it lasted...
When Charlton Heston left this mortal coil at the ripe old age of 83 last month, most of the obits that ran gave equal prominence to the Hollywood legend's affiliation with the NRA as they did to his status as one of cinema's most iconic actors. After all, the last time that most of us saw him on screen was his cameo appearance in Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, when the rotund lefty iconoclast stormed the grounds of the noted rightie's compound high in the Hollywood Hills and forced the bordering-on-senile Heston into doing one of the most painful interviews ever committed to celluloid. "I'm assuming you keep guns in the house?", Moore asked Heston. "Indeed I do," Heston replied. "Bad guys take note." And from the looks of this photo of the massive arsenal that Heston kept in his basement, the "bad guys" he was referring probably weren't of the common crook variety, but rather the size of the army that attempted to take over the state of Colorado in Red Dawn. The full-sized photo in question, after the jump.
After spending a few good minutes checking out the stash of weapons (yes, that's a flamethrower on the far right) that CH accumulated, we couldn't help but flashback to the scene in Falling Down where the protagonist D-FENS (excellently played by Michael Douglas) wanders into a gun shop owned by a rabid White Power/Nazi enthusiast. Now we're not accusing Heston of being either racist or an anti-Semite — after all, he was the first actor to shatter the taboo that humans and extraterrestrial apes couldn't french — but rather that someone who obsessed this much over weaponry that they went out and amassed a collection that included a Howitzer (!) clearly could've spent more time on an analyst's couch dealing with his issues than he apparently spent at the antique gun shop. While the fourth grader in us would've thought this collection was totally sweet, the grown-up version of us is glad that someone took the keys to this room away from Heston during his final, Alzheimer-stricken days.
And, just for posterity's sake, here's the interview between Michael Moore and Charlton Heston that we were referring to above.
