From his cold, dead hands

http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2008/04/planet-of-the-a.html

It seems like many of the cultural figures of my youth are moving on to the next place these days. One week it is Gary Gygax and the next Charleton Heston. The link is to the LA Times piece by former Reasoner Tim Cavanaugh. He, like me, was touched at the time by Heston's trio of 70s dystopia movies: Planet of the Apes, the Omega Man (an earlier interpretation of the same piece as the recent I Am Legend) and Soylent Green. Like Cavanaugh says, these movies, along with a few others like Dirty Harry, really capture the deep malaise of the 70s in a way that I think would otherwise be quite difficult to explain to, say, my undergraduate econometrics students. And Heston really is key to making all three of them work. RIP.

Addendum - the Economist's rather different take:

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11004056