Published via Ecency

(source: tmdb.org)

“Epic” is the word that is, for most people, associated with films. This could be dated to the 1950s, when Hollywood, faced with the existential threat of the emerging medium of television, tried to provide audiences with colour, new exciting picture formats, visual splendour, spectacle and other things that could not be enjoyed as black-and-white images on tiny television sets. The result of those efforts was a series of “larger-than-life” films, many of which would leave a lasting imprint on the history of cinema and become part of popular culture. The largest and most successful of them was Ben-Hur, the 1959 film directed by William Wyler.

It is based on Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, an 1880 novel by American general and politician Lew Wallace. The film begins with a prologue that depicts the visit of the three Magi to a baby who would later become known as Jesus Christ. The plot continues in Jerusalem in the year 26 AD, when Judaea was under the increasingly oppressive rule of the Roman Empire. The protagonist, played by Charlton Heston, is Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince and wealthy merchant who is visited by Messala (played by Stephen Boyd), a Roman who used to be his good childhood friend. Their friendship becomes strained when Messala, recently appointed as a military commander, demands Judah betray his countrymen who might have spoken or acted against Roman rule, which Judah refuses to do. When a stray tile from Judah’s home accidentally falls off during a Roman parade and nearly kills the governor, Messala uses this as an excuse to arrest Judah and his family. Although he knows that his friend is innocent, he condemns him to slavery, while Judah’s mother Miriam (played by Martha Scott) and sister Tirzah (played by Cathy O’Donnell) are taken away. Judah is brought to a Roman galley where he is forced to serve as an oarsman. His physical strength and defiant attitude bring him to the attention of the Roman consul and naval commander Quintus Arrius (played by Jack Hawkins). When his ship is sunk during a battle with Macedonian pirates, Judah saves Arrius’s life. Despite the loss of his ship, Arrius’s fleet wins the battle and Arrius returns to Rome in triumph, expressing gratitude to Judah by adopting him as his son, giving him freedom, wealth and the opportunity to train and become an expert charioteer. After a few years he decides to return to Judaea to reunite with his family. Esther (played by Haya Harareet), daughter of his family’s loyal servant Simonides (played by Sam Jaffe), discovers that both women contracted leprosy during imprisonment and were later banished from the city. In order to spare him pain, Esther tells him that both women died. This infuriates Judah, who decides to get his revenge by competing against Messala in a chariot race, during which he drives a quadriga provided by the Arab sheikh Ildirim (played by Hugh Griffith).

Wallace’s novel, just like the film, was a huge hit and became the most successful and most popular piece of American literature of the 19th century. It immediately attracted the attention of playwrights and, later, the emerging medium of motion pictures, resulting in two adaptations in the silent era – a short 1907 film and the much longer 1925 version starring Ramon Novarro, which became the most expensive and most spectacular silent film ever made. The remake, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, one of the most celebrated studios of Classic Hollywood, was intended to tell this story not only by adding sound and bright colours, but also by providing a spectacle the audience had not had the opportunity to experience before. No expense was spared and the new version of Ben-Hur became the most expensive film made up to that point in history. Those huge resources are quite visible on the screen, as was a great effort to reconstruct the worlds of ancient Rome and Judea as realistically as possible. Lacking CGI, modern special effects and other tools makers of such epic films today take for granted, producers had to use old-school methods. This involved building immensely huge sets and employing tens of thousands of extras during mass scenes. The result is still impressive today, and one can only imagine how impressive it was for audiences six decades ago.

A lot of credit for that should go to William Wyler, one of the most respected and successful directors of Classic Hollywood. As a filmmaker whose previous hits were relatively low-key dramas like Mrs. Miniver or The Best Years of Our Lives, he might have looked an unusual choice for a project of such ambition and scale. But Wyler met this challenge admirably, handling the huge resources at his disposal with great skill during the long and gruelling shoot, which involved concerns of studio executives over the ballooning budget and the death of producer Sam Zimbalist from a heart attack. Wyler employs wide shots to stage nearly perfect scenes and give truly epic scope to the story. He was aided by the good cinematographer Robert L. Surtees and veteran composer Miklós Rózsa, whose score for the film was, like the film itself, the longest in the history of cinema and later had a huge influence on future authors of film music. Wyler also had great help from Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, who directed the famous chariot race sequence, one of the most famous and celebrated action scenes in the history of cinema. The scene, which, somewhat unusually, does not feature any music, was a mini-spectacle in itself, made on one of the most spectacular sets ever built and shot with the help of enormously talented and brave stuntmen, including Canutt’s son Joe, who received a minor injury in a shot that would ultimately be included in the film. The scene itself represents Hollywood filmmaking at its best and was enough to make Ben-Hur an undisputed classic, even if the rest of the film did not meet its high standards.

While the images and sounds were awe-inspiring, it was quite a different story with the script. The original author Karl Tunberg (who was the only writer officially credited) had a first version not to Wyler’s liking, and by the end of the production a few more writers were hired – S. N. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, Gore Vidal and Christopher Fry. The result of so many conflicting inputs into the screenplay, as in so many Hollywood productions, was reflected in the general quality. The scriptwriters had a difficult task, though. As in so many Hollywood biblical epics, they had to manoeuvre between displaying the splendour of ancient tyranny and decadence with a strong moralistic stance in line with the teachings of the Bible. This approach, which served Hollywood very well in the first half of the 20th century, when the new medium had to win the hearts and minds of religious conservatives, results in the film occasionally losing its focus. Ben-Hur can be described as a classic adventure story very much like The Count of Monte Cristo. Its protagonist is a man who has everything, loses everything, hits rock bottom but rises due to happy circumstances and gets his revenge. But, at the same time, Ben-Hur is also supposed to be an unquestionably Christian film that promotes values of humility and pacifism. Wyler tries to solve this problem by intertwining the general plot with scenes depicting Jesus (played by opera singer Claude Heater in an uncredited role), who is depicted as a truly larger-than-life figure in an ingenious and effective way. The audience never sees his face, but his presence is shown through the reactions of other people, including the protagonist. Those scenes are powerful, but in a way become something of a distraction, and the last thirty minutes, which feature the protagonist’s interactions with Jesus before the Crucifixion, might make this film slow, especially for today’s audience and those who are familiar with the Bible and know what will happen.

The role of Judah Ben-Hur is often considered the most successful in the career of Charlton Heston, an actor who became something of a specialist for biblical and historical epics, following his role as Moses in The Ten Commandments a few years earlier. In this film Heston looks the part and uses his physique both to create a charismatic presence and to serve as a credible protagonist in action scenes. Although he won an Oscar, this is not the best performance of his career. This is partly because his character is not as complex as some of the characters he would play later, and partly because his skills at this point lacked proper range. This becomes evident during the short scenes featuring Stephen Boyd as his friend turned mortal enemy. Boyd is much more energetic and believable in his role, and his performance allowed space for much more interpretation, the most notable being Gore Vidal’s (in)famous claim in the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet that he had written the character of Messala as Judah’s former gay lover, which created a lot of controversy, denials and debate that lasts to this day. There was not any such attention to the film’s main female role of Esther, mostly because the obligatory romantic subplot looked somewhat redundant and partly because Heston lacked proper chemistry with Israeli actress Haya Harareet. More memorable is the character of Sheikh Ildirim, played by Welsh actor Hugh Griffith, who serves as something of comic relief. In today’s climate, an Arab character played by a white actor in dark makeup would be considered offensive, but, on the other hand, even today, in the context of the unending Arab-Israeli conflict, it is refreshing to see a Jewish and an Arab character being part of the same team, which underlines the novel’s and film’s message of universal brotherhood.

Despite some of its shortcomings, including its excessive length that might deter today’s less patient viewers, as well as some too preachy and wooden dialogue, Ben-Hur is still a very good film. It became the commercially most successful film after Gone with the Wind and its impressive box-office success was followed by absolute triumph at the Oscars, when it won a total of eleven statues, establishing a record that would not be matched until Titanic and The Return of the King. Many might argue that such an achievement is undeserved, but most of those who are patient enough to watch it are likely to appreciate it as a stellar example of films Hollywood does not make any more.

(Note: The film’s Christian theme did not sit well with certain countries, like Muslim Libya, which refused to provide locations to producers, or Communist countries, like Yugoslavia, whose official ideology was state atheism. In the latter, only a shortened version, which edited out all references to Jesus and Christianity, was available for many decades. Citizens of Yugoslavia, including the author of this review, gained the opportunity to watch the integral version in cinemas only in the 1980s. Many of its film critics, while happy about censorship being lifted, found the 1950s Hollywood spectacle dated and somewhat underwhelming in the age of Lucas and Spielberg. That might explain why Ben-Hur does not have the universal appeal and legacy its creators hoped to achieve.)

RATING: 7/10 (+++)