RIP Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

I had a TV in my room since I was about six-years-old and I would very often watch television shows and movies alone; my parents always wanted to watch something else so they thought the idea of putting a TV up in my room as pure convenience for everyone in the house. Every year, I would watch Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 classic, The Ten Commandments, alone on TV around Easter time. I didn't know much about its Biblical significance back then, but I was entertained by the extravagance and ambitiousness of the picture nonetheless. As a child, I didn't know much about the more detailed aspects of film, but I knew what I liked and what I didn't like. In the case of The Ten Commandments, I was loving what I saw and heard from the screen.

One of the many things I saw and heard on screen was Charlton Heston as Moses. But I never acknowledged Heston as an actor playing Moses. He simply was Moses. Heston held such a convincing command over the role that his presence alone was enough to describe the film as a larger-than-life epic. His voice and demeanor possessed a wondrous authority that it became the basic foundation of the film itself.

He will be missed.