This is an oddity in Charlton Heston’s canon of films. It is essentially Heston as loner cowboy Will Penny and Joan Hackett, as a woman en route to settle with her husband in Oregon, falling in love over a cold winter and fighting a bunch of bible-thumping gun-toting lunatics. Now it seems to me that the only bible-thumping gun-toting lunatic in every other Charlton Heston film is Charlton Heston, world-renowned star of stage and screen and President of the National Rifle Association. But Will Penny was made back when Heston was still a strong Civil Rights advocate who even marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. and won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy (I bet those liberal minded folk wish they could take that one back!). It’s only now, after his activism took a sharp turn to the right, that a film marketed as an anti-violence revisionist western like Will Penny can be seen in a different light – as a call to arms and a defence of the Second Amendment.
If anybody other than Charlton Heston had the title role in this film, it would not have disappeared from film lover’s radar screens and wallowed in movie obscurity. For Clint Eastwood, it could have been a prequel to Unforgiven and The Beguiled and could have been a perfect transition from his Man With No Name trilogy to his grittier later work. For Henry Fonda, it could have been an earlier Oscar. But for Heston, while he admits it is one of his favourite films, Will Penny comes across as nothing more than what was to come of the actor himself: a gun enthusiast championing self-defence with a weapon. Even if the movie was made before Heston became a symbol of conservative Republican values, it’s difficult to separate the role of Will Penny from what Charlton Heston later became.
Whether you agree or disagree with Heston’s politics is beside the point. The fact is that it became difficult to differentiate between Heston’s onscreen persona and Heston himself and this, naturally, skews every role he has played. My criticism of Heston’s political activism taking over his career aside, Will Penny is stunningly photographed and well directed by Tom Gries. Hackett plays the role of a woman alone on the frontier very well and she matches Heston in every scene. Donald Pleasance is convincing as sadistic Preacher Quint and makes an excellent foil to Heston’s Penny. But this film’s message has changed over the years, largely as a result of its star. Without the benefit of movie history and a lot of background hindsight, many will see this is as equally jingoistic and pro-gun as The Green Berets and Rambo.
