From Moses to Michelangelo, medieval warlords to the last man on Earth, legendary actor Charlton Heston made a career of playing characters driven to the far extremes of physical and often spiritual endurance. "My admiration for man is in terms of the extraordinary individual, rather than man in the mass," Heston once observed, and if anything defines his work, it’s the degree to which he literally stood out from (and above) the pack. Watch his performance as the tormented, unwilling prophet in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, the chivalrous yet reluctant hero in EL CID and you see a beautiful balancing act between desperation and perseverance, ego and absolution. It’s no wonder that Heston maintained a lifelong love for Shakespeare and the stage -- his finest performances are Shakespearean in both their grand ambition and their rich, human detail. Born in 1923 in Evanston, Illinois, Heston studied speech and theater in college; after a short stint in the Air Force, he moved to New York City in 1948, where he quickly found supporting roles in Broadway productions and was soon discovered by the fledgling TV industry for lead roles in live productions of "Jane Eyre" and others. His second Hollywood feature, THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, established him in the rugged, larger-than-life roles that became his trademark as an actor; by the time of TOUCH OF EVIL in 1958, he carried enough weight in the industry to force Universal to hire Orson Welles as the film’s director. With BEN-HUR, he was able to savor his first taste of iconic status – a stature and image that never left him even during his last days. Please join us for the weekend to celebrate three of Charlton Heston’s most memorable achievements on film!

Friday, June 6 – 7:30 PM

Egyptian 85^th Anniversary Screening

BEN-HUR 1959, Warner Bros., 212 min. Dir. William Wyler. Technicolor was made for epics like this: Boyhood comrades Charlton Heston, in one of his most iconic roles, and Stephen Boyd grow up to be fierce enemies in the time of Christ. The grueling chariot race is worth the price of admission alone. Winner of 11 Oscars including Best Picture. Originally premiered at the Egyptian (and ran for two years straight)! A performance that made Heston the go-to-man when it came to casting bigger-than-life epics. "Out of this sea of celluloid, a masterful director, William (WUTHERING HEIGHTS, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES) Wyler, has fished a whale of a picture, the biggest and the best of Hollywood's super-spectacles." – Time.

EL CID, 1961, The Weinstein Company, 184 min. Of all the massive Hollywood costume films of the early 1960s, we’ll pick this as our favorite. Charlton Heston (Who else could play this role?) and Sophia Loren co-star as the legendary Spanish warrior and his wife, in director Anthony Mann’s epic masterpiece, a movie that effortlessly blends the moral weight and character complexities of his greatest westerns with the conflicted, doomed romanticism of his initial film noir efforts. One of Miklos Rozsa’s finest scores elevates the film into transcendental territory. Co-starring Raf Vallone, Genevieve Page, John Fraser, Michael Hordern."To say that EL CID is the most intelligent of the…epics of the early '60s is to damn it with faint praise…Interiors are composed like sprawling murals while battle sequences are shot through with austere clarity, both infused with the director's astonishing moral intensity… There's no denying EL CID’s lucid grandeur as it reaches its famous climax, a simultaneously triumphant and tragic portrait of the warrior…that, like the best of Mann's work, never neglects the human toll of heroism." – Fernando F. Croce, Slant Magazine.