Ben-Hur (1959) Review

Official trailer

Ben-Hur is slow and kind of preachy, and it contains a sequence that ranks among the greatest ever put on film. Both things are true, and that’s why it gets a 7 here instead of the 10 its reputation demands.

William Wyler directed. Charlton Heston plays Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince in Roman Judea. Stephen Boyd plays Messala, his childhood friend who returns as a Roman officer. Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet and Hugh Griffith fill out the cast.

I admire this film more than I enjoy it. The first half grips me, Heston and Boyd have real heat between them, and the race makes my palms sweat. Then the story turns into a Sunday school lesson, and I start counting the minutes.

It cost about $15 million, the most expensive film made to that point, and earned roughly $146 million. It won eleven Academy Awards, a record since matched by Titanic and The Return of the King and never beaten.

The Story

Judah and Messala grew up together. Messala comes back to Jerusalem as the new tribune and asks his old friend to name the Jews plotting against Rome. Judah refuses. When a loose tile falls from Judah’s roof during a parade, Messala uses it as an excuse, sends him to the galleys and imprisons his mother and sister.

Judah survives three years chained to an oar, and saves a Roman consul during a naval battle. The consul adopts him, and Judah returns to Judea a wealthy man with one purpose: finding his family and destroying Messala. The confrontation comes in the circus at Jerusalem, in a chariot race the film has been building toward for two hours. What follows the race is the story of what Judah does with his hatred once it’s satisfied.

The Chariot Race

Nine minutes, no music, and no faking. The race was staged on an eighteen-acre set at Cinecittà, the largest ever built at the time, with real chariots, real teams of horses and stunt drivers taking real risks.

Second unit director Andrew Marton and stunt coordinator Yakima Canutt built it shot by shot over months, with Canutt’s son doubling Heston. The famous moment where Judah is pitched over the front of his chariot and climbs back aboard began as an accident, when Joe Canutt was tossed into the air, and Marton kept the shot. It’s still the best sequence of its kind. Modern action films with a hundred times the computing power rarely match it, because everything in frame is physically happening and the geography is always clear. This sequence is what keeps the rating as high as it is. What thrills me is that I always know where every chariot is, and when that driver is pitched over the front of his chariot and climbs back aboard, I have trouble believing a human being survived it.

Charlton Heston

Heston is exactly what the part needs: enormous, dignified and utterly serious. He won the Academy Award for it, and he holds the center of a three-and-a-half-hour film without visible strain. He’s better in the first half, when Judah is angry, than in the second, when the script asks him to be spiritually transformed. The anger is playable. The script writes the transformation as a state instead of a process.

I’m with Heston all the way through the anger. Once the script makes him holy he goes stiff, and I don’t blame him, because there’s nothing on the page to play.

Stephen Boyd is his equal as Messala, and the friendship between them in the early scenes is the film’s most convincing relationship. Hugh Griffith won an Academy Award as the sheikh who owns the horses, playing broad comedy in a film that badly needs some.

Wyler’s Direction

William Wyler had made Roman Holiday, The Best Years of Our Lives and Wuthering Heights before this, and he was a director of actors more than of spectacle. MGM handed him the biggest production in its history and he brought a chamber-drama sensibility to it.

That’s why the quiet scenes work. The confrontation between Judah and Messala in the early reels is staged as two men in a room, and the tension in it is as strong as anything in the circus. That early scene between the two men is my favorite thing in the film after the race. Wyler lets the friendship die right in front of me, and it hurts more than anything that happens in the circus. He also knew what he had. Wyler left the chariot race to his second unit and spent his own time on performances, so a film this size never feels like a parade of sets with actors in front of them.

The Preachy Problem

Lew Wallace subtitled his 1880 novel A Tale of the Christ, and the film keeps that shape. Jesus appears throughout, always from behind or at a distance, and the film arranges the story so that Judah’s path keeps crossing his.

It’s handled with restraint by the standards of 1950s biblical epics, and it still slows the film badly. The last forty minutes set the revenge plot aside for the crucifixion, a miraculous healing and a closing scene of forgiveness. That’s where my patience runs out. I don’t mind a religious story, and I’d still have cut those forty minutes to a quarter of their length, because the film has made its point long before then and keeps making it. After two hours of a good revenge story and the best action scene ever filmed, the film stops being about Judah and becomes a sermon. That’s the reason for the 7.

The Scale

Everything in the film is real. The galley sequence used full-size ships and hundreds of extras. The Roman parade, the circus, the streets of Jerusalem and the Valley of the Lepers were all built.

Miklós Rózsa’s score is a hugely influential piece of film music, and the production design set a template that biblical epics copied for a decade.

The cost nearly sank MGM and then saved it. The film’s success is the main reason the studio survived the early 1960s, and its failure to repeat that trick with Mutiny on the Bounty and others is part of why the epic cycle ended.

What Holds Up

The first two hours are strong. The friendship and its collapse, the galleys, the sea battle, the return and the race are all excellent, and Wyler shoots them with a confidence that never rushes.

The film is also well acted for an epic of its period, and that’s rarer than the genre’s reputation suggests. Heston, Boyd and Griffith are all doing real work. What doesn’t hold up is the pace and the pulpit. Three and a half hours is a long time, and the film spends its last act on a message it had already delivered. It’s a 7: one great sequence, one good revenge story, and a sermon nobody asked for.

Craft Note

Is Ben-Hur worth watching?

Watch the first two hours and the chariot race. It’s the best action sequence of its era and still hasn’t been beaten on its own terms. Heston and Boyd are both excellent and the scale is real. It’s a 7. I get real pleasure out of the first two hours, the race alone is worth the evening, and Heston and Boyd give the revenge story teeth. What drags it down is the running time and a last act that drops that revenge story to deliver a sermon I’d already absorbed by the halfway mark.

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