He was, is, and will always be, a legend. The likes of Charlton Heston will never be seen again.

He added class to whatever project he touched, from his work in famous epics - as Moses in The Ten Commandments, Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, and Judah the Jewish chariot racer in Ben-Hur - and on through his science-fiction period of the late '60s and '70s. Commentary may likely concentrate on those early classics. Here we'll diverge a bit and briefly touch upon his science fiction work, without which our popular culture would just not be the same.

One example would be Heston's star turn in the The Omega Man, a movie that would be laughable without his participation, and comes near to being so even with it. Will Smith's own star turn in the recent I Am Legend is, for a movie as a whole, a better version of the Richard Matheson novella, but it will enter the cultural memory purely as a tale of horror well told. After seeing Legend at the multiplex with son, Leo, we Netflixed The Omega Man. The film features fine performances by both Heston and Anthony Zerbe, in a role that was made for him, as the head of the bloodthirsty zombie tribe called The Family.

In the 2007 version of the story, the zombie vampires are more like wild animals. In The Omega Man, they're demonic hippies, a bit of prescient bucking of the cultural tide, you might say, in 1971, a time when hippie sensibilities were entering the mainstream. Watch it these days and you see that it has become something more like meta-camp. Intentionally or not, it is self-reflexive, with a low-intensity irony that reaches beyond its own time. How could the makers have known that hippies would be regarded with such disdain decades later?

In The Omega Man, Heston is the seeming last non-zombie-hippie on Earth. The hippie parallel with The Family is nailed down in this scene, Heston alone in a movie theatre, where the film Woodstock is destined to play, over and over, for eternity:

Heston does a little more acting in this clip:

We hadn't seen The Omega Man since seeing it in 1973 as a revival. Two years after its 1971 release it appeared as the opening entry in a Charlton Heston sci-fi double feature at a drive-in theater in New Jersey. The other entry, Soylent Green, was in the fourth or fifth run of its own release cycle. (Or whatever playing at a drive-in in 1973 New Jersey constituted, marketing-wise. Last run more than likely.) Seeing these two films together at a drive-in those many years ago has stayed with us.