As much as you might admire the scale of moviemaking involved, Ben-Hur is really an incredibly long, slow film. It won the Oscar for Best Film Editing (among its record-setting eleven wins), but since it clocks in at more than 3.5 hours, you have to wonder if it wouldn’t move a bit faster if about an hour (or two) had been sliced out of it. Honestly, only the chariot race sequence – which comes in the last third of the movie – is brilliantly edited. It’s full of energy, and the excitement of the race is clearly evident on the screen. The rest is not quite as thrilling.
Before we viewers can get to the chariot race, we have to slog through a couple of hours of a plot involving two former friends who seem to turn on each other through a strange sequence of events. Judah Ben-Hur (played by a rather wooden Charlton Heston) is a Jewish prince, and Messala (Stephen Boyd, a bit less stiff compared to Heston) is his Roman friend from childhood who returns to Jerusalem as the commander of a Roman contingent. Messala wants to know which Jews have refused to swear allegiance to Rome so that they might be punished. Ben-Hur refuses both to give up any names and to swear his allegiance to Rome. That’s only his first mistake in his interactions with Messala.
The sequence involving their reunion has been one of some controversy over the years. Allegedly, novelist Gore Vidal, one of the many people who were asked to help rewrite the script, told Boyd to play the part as though Messala and Judah were former lovers. The film’s director, the great William Wyler, and others involved in making the movie have disputed this assertion, Heston being the most vocal in his denouncing of Vidal’s claim. Of course, Vidal claims the idea was kept a secret from Heston, so how would Heston know what Boyd was told? Either way, it’s tough now not to look at the way that Boyd looks at Heston and not contemplate if he’s lusting after his “friend.” Having that as a possibility actually makes the interaction between Boyd and Heston and, by extension, Messala and Judah more intriguing.
During a processional of Roman soldiers – the film features several such processionals, and they’re all rather unnecessarily lengthy – some roofing tiles fall from where Judah and his sister are watching. The horses get scared and throw some riders, including the new governor of Judeah, so someone has to be punished. Ben-Hur is forced to serve on a ship’s galley as a rower, and his mother and sister are sentenced to prison, where they contract leprosy. Messala uses Judah as an example: even a formerly close friend has to suffer if he refuses to bow down to Roman rule. It still seems like a rather harsh sentence for watching some old guy fall off his horse without even getting seriously injured. However, all of this is played very seriously, particularly by Heston.
After three years as a galley rower, Heston’s Judah is, as the kids might say, “jacked.” Even in 1959 (or ancient times), rowing was a great upper body workout. This must be why Heston appears without his shirt (and wearing little else) during this sequence. It’s not a bad look for him, honestly. During a sea battle whose special effects have aged rather badly, Judah saves the Roman consul onboard, Arrius, and so grateful is Arrius that he adopts Ben-Hur. Isn’t Judah a grown man at this point? How can someone adopt a grown-up? The Romans just had different rules for everything, it seems.
Judah also trains to become a charioteer, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves and overlooking a few of the side trips that the film takes along the way. For example, earlier in the film, Judah has freed one of his slaves, Esther (a lovely Haya Harareet), so that she can marry. Of course, it’s quite clear that they have the hots for each other, so I’m not sure why he doesn’t just marry her himself. When he reunites with her, she, for reasons that make no sense, tells him that his mother and sister are dead instead of just saying that they’re now lepers and living in a cave. The truth would have been harsh, but certainly it would have been less painful.
I would like to point out that the book upon which the film is based is entitled Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (by Lew Wallace). This film is sometimes even referred to as a religious epic. However, the figure of Christ only appears four times that I was able to count, and each time that figure is somewhat muted. The film actually begins with Jesus’s birth and the arrival of the Magi or Three Wise Men, but the image of Jesus is rather obscured in the background. Later in the film, we only see the back of Jesus’s head and his hand as he gives Judah water (an interesting turnaround from Biblical accounts). Near the film’s end, a group of people are listening to Jesus preach what must be the Sermon on the Mount even though it is never clearly identified as such. We are also witness to the crucifixion (from a distance) followed by a cleansing rain that erases the leprosy from Ben-Hur’s mother and sister. It seems a bit disingenuous to identify this as a religious film when the most overt moment of religiosity is when Hugh Griffith’s Sheik IIderman gives Ben-Hur a Star of David before the big chariot race. Why an Arab would have in his possession a symbol of Judaism is a bit mysterious, though.
As I stated earlier, the chariot race is really the highlight of the film, and it appears in the final third of the movie. Messala is driving something called a “Greek” chariot with spikes extending from the wheels, very dangerous looking stuff. He tries to destroy Judah’s chariot and even attacks his former friend with a whip. However, he’s the one who winds up falling from his chariot and being run over by another competitor. The makeup people did a good job of showing how injured Messala is, but you can’t help wondering what such an effect would look like today. (Well, I suppose you could watch the 2016 remake, but I’m not sitting through this story again. Ever.) Messala tells Ben-Hur where his mother and sister are, and they are reunited with him just in time for Jesus to cure their leprosy.
Ben-Hur was the first film to earn 11 Academy Awards, a record that lasted until 1997’s Titanic won the same number. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King from 2003 joined that august company a few years later. Ben-Hur only lost in one category for which it was nominated: Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It’s a big movie, and everything is on such a large scale that it would be tough to ignore such a film when it came to awards recognition. There are enormous sets, tons of costumes and props, and elaborate processionals and celebrations. You sometimes need reminders like this film that Hollywood had to use actual locations and real people in the past, not computers and whatever passes for Artificial Intelligence these days in order to make big movies.
Oscar Wins: Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Charlton Heston), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Hugh Griffith), Best Director, Best Color Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Color Costume Design, Best Sound, Best Film Editing, Best Special Effects, and Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture
Other Oscar Nomination: Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
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