When Charlton Heston left this mortal coil at the ripe old age of 83 last month, most of the obits that ran gave equal prominence to the Hollywood legend's affiliation with the NRA as they did to his status as one of cinema's most iconic actors. After all, the last time that most of us saw him on screen was his cameo appearance in Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, when the rotund lefty iconoclast stormed the grounds of the noted rightie's compound high in the Hollywood Hills and forced the bordering-on-senile Heston into doing one of the most painful interviews ever committed to celluloid. "I'm assuming you keep guns in the house?", Moore asked Heston. "Indeed I do," Heston replied. "Bad guys take note." And from the looks of this photo of the massive arsenal that Heston kept in his basement, the "bad guys" he was referring probably weren't of the common crook variety, but rather the size of the army that attempted to take over the state of Colorado in Red Dawn. The full-sized photo in question, after the jump.

After spending a few good minutes checking out the stash of weapons (yes, that's a flamethrower on the far right) that CH accumulated, we couldn't help but flashback to the scene in Falling Down where the protagonist D-FENS (excellently played by Michael Douglas) wanders into a gun shop owned by a rabid White Power/Nazi enthusiast. Now we're not accusing Heston of being either racist or an anti-Semite — after all, he was the first actor to shatter the taboo that humans and extraterrestrial apes couldn't french — but rather that someone who obsessed this much over weaponry that they went out and amassed a collection that included a Howitzer (!) clearly could've spent more time on an analyst's couch dealing with his issues than he apparently spent at the antique gun shop. While the fourth grader in us would've thought this collection was totally sweet, the grown-up version of us is glad that someone took the keys to this room away from Heston during his final, Alzheimer-stricken days.

And, just for posterity's sake, here's the interview between Michael Moore and Charlton Heston that we were referring to above.

• Charlton Heston's Basement Arsenal [AdScam/The Horror!]

Planet of the Apes? It was so below what we were doing! Also, I'll tell you something else: We had stuff stolen. I can't say it was Planet of the Apes, but they were the only other movie shooting at the same time and same place we were. Stanley and I even had someone steal a mask and some ape hands right out from under our noses on the backlot, where someone had hid in a drainage ditch. We were in lockdown all the time.

Most whispers over the years have suspected Planet star Charlton Heston himself, whose kleptomaniacal drive for monkey superiority was one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets of the last four decades. Closure is within reach since the star's passing, however, when an autopsy revealed that the period rifle pried from his cold, dead hands was in fact lifted from the set of Kubrick's 1975 epic Barry Lyndon. We knew it! A face-to-face afterlife apology is surely forthcoming.

• Dan Richter on Playing the Ape in '2001' [Vulture]

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The 1950s belonged to Heston, an Evanston, Ill., native whose early roles as historical figures like Marc Antony (Julius Caesar) and Buffalo Bill (Pony Express) presaged more massive-scale work for directors Cecil B. DemIlle (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments) and William Wyler, who directed Heston to an Oscar in 1959's Ben-Hur. Heston notably (if unconvincingly) portrayed a Mexican narcotics detective in Orson Welles' noir classic Touch of Evil, moving on a decade later to the campy sci-fi allegories Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973).

Despite stirring bit turns in Wayne's World 2 and the 2001 Apes remake, Heston's stint as the president of the National Rifle Association was perhaps his defining accomplishment of the last decade; waving a musket you could "pry from my cold, dead hands," his 2000 speech to his NRA constituency provoked Michael Moore's humiliating Heston-estate visit in Bowling For Columbine, among Heston's last and least-auspicious screen appearances. We at Defamer prefer to remember the better times, which is why we bring you a trailer for one of the underrated gems in the Heston oeuvre. Rest in peace, Chuck.