Over the last decade, Charlton Heston was known mostly for his tenacious, if rocky, leadership of the National Rifle Association, holiday reruns of “The Ten Commandments,” and his sad diagnosis with Alzheimer's disease. Most of his obituaries this week recognized him as a bedrock conservative and, certainly, at least later in life, he was that. But the political impact that Heston had on me, as a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, was purely progressive.

In the ‘60s, Heston was an active supporter of the civil rights movement who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., and spoke out against segregation. But it was his films of that period, mostly sci-fi B movies, that made their mark on me.

In “Planet of the Apes,” Heston played an alpha male astronaut who learns what it’s like to be stripped of his dignity and very humanity by a world run by intelligent apes. Co-written by Rod Serling of "Twilight Zone" fame, the first Apes film is a harsh critique of the racism, war and violence that were boiling over in America when the film debuted in 1968.

In “Soylent Green,” set in the year 2022, New York City’s population has swelled to 40 million, global warming has temperatures on the rise, and fresh food is so scarce and expensive that the masses consume processed foods (soylent blue, yellow and green) with mysterious ingredients. Inequality is at extreme levels, as a few rich people live apart from the hungry masses. Heston plays a cop investigating a murder who learns the terrible truth about his socially (and literally) cannibalistic society. As in “Planet of the Apes,” Heston’s journey is from a confident member of the governing class to a horrified outsider who, simply by virtue of his knowledge and political awareness, is a threat to the system.

And then there was “The Ten Commandments,” which ran incessantly on TV throughout my youth. I knew the Exodus story from church and family, but it was this film that brought home to me that the ancient Jewish people, like my own African-American ancestors, were slaves struggling to be free, and that that struggle was a psychological
as well as a physical one; escaping Egypt was not the same as escaping the experience of slavery.

This is the Charlton Heston that I remember: the astronaut Taylor realizing that it was his own dysfunctional society that spawned the violent and oppressive world of the apes; detective Robert Thorn screaming to the winds that “Soylent Green is people!”; Moses realizing that slavery is not just a state of bondage, but also a state of mind.

To be sure, Heston took a sharp political right turn beginning in the 1980s and continuing into this decade. (He campaigned for Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond before heading the NRA.) And who knows if he ever personally bought into the revolutionary narrative behind so many of the roles he played. But in the context of the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, those roles helped shape the political consciousness of a generation—at least for those of us with the TV on.