Ben-Hur (1959)
Ben-Hur (1959)
I can't stop thinking about the Roman Empire, send help.
Guys, no. Just no. We already watched The Robe. This is just The Robe with a chariot race. And, just like The Robe, this is a deeply unenjoyable movie. At least The Robe had the decency to be only two hours.1
Ben-Hur follows the trials of wealthy Jewish merchant Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) after his onetime friend Messala (Stephen Boyd) sentences him to slavery in a Roman galley. When Judah saves the life of a Roman counsul (Jack Hawkins) in battle, he is freed and adopted. He becomes an esteemed Roman chariot racer, returns to his home of Jerusalem, bests Messala in a chariot race, marries his former slave Esther (Haya Harareet), and watches as his mother and sister are cured of leprosy by Jesus.
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” you may think.2 Here’s the problem: the script, pacing, and acting are all bottom-shelf. Sometimes the spectacle is impressive—the movie employed thousands of extras and was, at the time, the most expensive movie ever made—but “spectacle” doesn’t overcome the basic problems of Judah’s lack of characterization and Charlton Heston’s inability to give Judah depth. And I know the movie is ostensibly about Christ, but Judah’s Forrest Gump-esque placement around Jesus adds nothing to the story. Getting through this thing was a chore.
Rating: 3/10. You wanna know the movie most comparable to Ben-Hur? It’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999).
Cast and Crew
Born John Carter3, Charlton Heston is one and done in this column but his legacy in film is not to be forgotten. Ask any old guy what he thinks about Heston and you’ll hear him rave about Heston’s larger-than-life presence and face chiseled from stone. I’m not taking anything away from that. But Heston’s wooden performance in Ben-Hur offers nothing to the viewer since, y’know, grimacing ≠ acting.
But Charlton Heston, whose acting range seemed to consist mostly of playing Charlton Heston, played Charlton Heston in all sorts of stuff:
More sword-and-sandals hokum: besides Ben-Hur, he was Moses in The Ten Commandments (1955) and John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
Historical dramas: he played Andrew Jackson twice (The President’s Lady, 1953, and The Buccaneer, 1958), El Cid (El Cid, 1961), and Michelangelo (The Agony and the Ecstasy, 1965).
Had his “dystopian” period: Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man4 (1971), and Soylent Green (1973). Around then, he was also facing down disasters in Skyjacked (1972), Earthquake (1974) and Airport 1975 (1974).
This isn’t just a great career. This is an all-timer career, an inner-circle Hall of Fame career.5 Beyond just the film highlights, you should also know about his presidency of the NRA and his struggle with Alzheimer’s at the end of his life. And yeah, I ripped him for his acting, but catch his cameo in Wayne’s World 2 and, yeah, it’s obvious he can act a little bit.
Gore Vidal was one of the Ben-Hur screenwriters.6 Vidal’s known for his historical fiction,7 which brimmed with social commentary; his plays, which included “The Best Man”; and his novel “Myra Breckinridge,” which was scandalous for the gender-affirming surgery its titular character undergoes.
Vidal was a writer whose works are still in the trivia canon, but he might’ve been better known for his delightful feuds with Truman Capote8, William F. Buckley, and Norman Mailer. He also attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a New Hampshire boarding school; “A Separate Peace,” a novel by John Knowles about that boarding school, includes a character based on Vidal.9
The Trivia
Ben-Hur was a remake of a 1925 film, and that 1925 film was an adaptation of Governor Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.” Lew Wallace had a bit of a Forrest Gump life himself, so today’s Trivia section will be about three interesting events he intersected with: the Civil War, the assassination of Abe Lincoln, and the capture of outlaw Billy the Kid.
Governor Wallace was first General Wallace,10 and he commanded a division of Union troops under U.S. Grant at the Civil War battle Shiloh (also called the Battle of Pittsburg [sic] Landing) in Tennessee against Confederacy generals Albert Sidney Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard. Fought on April 6 and 7, 1862, Shiloh was one of the bloodiest engagements of the war; Johnston died there.11 The name “Shiloh” is from Hebrew and is translated as “place of peace.” If you want to know how to get good at Civil War trivia, might I suggest watching Ken Burns’ PBS miniseries “The Civil War” at 2x speed?12 It’s only a bit longer than Ben-Hur if you do that.
After the war, Wallace served on two military commissions. The first investigated the Lincoln assassination conspirators and found eight people guilty; the two big ones to know are Samuel Mudd, a doctor who conspired with John Wilkes Booth and performed surgery on his fractured leg after the assassination, and Mary Surratt, who owned a boarding house where the conspirators conspired.13 The other commission Wallace served on investigated Henry Wirz, who had been in charge of Andersonville prison camp in Georgia. Wirz was also sentenced to death.
After supporting the Rutherford B. Hayes presidential campaign, Wallace was appointed governor of the New Mexico territory, where he served from 1878 to 1881. New Mexico had just been through the Lincoln County War, a bunch of Old West violence involving William H. Bonney, also known as Billy the Kid. After lots more Old West violence, Wallace had Sheriff Pat Garrett capture Billy. He captured him dead. Maybe check out the 1938 ballet “Billy the Kid” by Aaron Copland if you want more on that.
Odds and Ends
Welsh actor Hugh Griffith donned laughable brownface to play Sheik Ilderim and somehow won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for it14…MGM’s slogan: ars gratia artis, or “art for art’s sake”…the movie has an entr’acte, a pause between two parts of the movie…Christopher Fry, another Ben-Hur screenwriter, is known for “The Lady’s Not for Burning,” a 1948 play about witchcraft…William Wyler, director of Ben-Hur, holds the record for most Best Director Oscar nominations, with twelve15…Augustus Caesar was emperor of Rome when Jesus was born; Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, was emperor when Jesus died.
God, I hope this is the last time we have to watch The Robe.
This movie is 3 hours and 42 minutes long. In that time, Kelvin Kiptum could run over 48 miles, Joey Chestnut could eat 1,672 hot dogs, and you could binge-watch the whole first season of “Fleabag” and still have time for a healthy nap. It’s a long movie.
Especially considering the plots of some of the other movies we’ve watched. Really, Ben-Hur sounds a lot better than Separate Tables and Wild Is the Wind and A Hatful of Rain and Sayonara and wow, we’ve watched some not-great-sounding movies, haven’t we.
Oh, that’s also the name of a Disney movie! Like Ben-Hur, John Carter (2012) was one of the most expensive movies ever made (at the time, it trailed only two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels). John Carter, you may know, bombed. But interestingly, that film is based on “A Princess of Mars,” the first book in the “Barsoom” series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In those novels (and there are 11 of ‘em) a Civil War veteran is, uh, transported to Mars or something. Oh, and Michael Chabon co-scripted John Carter. I wish this whole article was about John Carter.
This film was the second adaptation of the novel “I Am Legend” by Richard Matheson. A third was helmed by Will Smith in 2007.
We didn’t even mention that he’s the lead in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, a movie considered the pinnacle of film noir that consistently ranks as one of the top 100 movies of all time.
Vidal, long after the movie came out, claimed his main contribution to the script had been to subtly imply that Judah Ben-Hur and Messala were gay. The famously conservative Charlton Heston did not like that.
His “Narratives of Empire” series about the U.S. included the works “1876,” “Burr,” “Lincoln,” and “Hollywood.” He also wrote “Julian” (about Julian the Apostate) and “Live from Golgotha” (about the crucifixion).
When Capote died, Vidal called his death “a wise career move.”
Vidal also acted in the 1992 film Bob Roberts, where he played the incumbent senator that Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins) runs against. As with many things, the only reason I’ve heard of this film is because of “The Simpsons” and their season six episode “Sideshow Bob Roberts,” where Sideshow Bob runs for mayor of Springfield.
And yeah, we don’t tend to use those titles together, since “governor-general” is a different thing. Sometimes people do use multiple titles, though, like with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or King Saint Stephen of Hungary.
Johnston was the highest-ranking officer to die in combat during the Civil War. He had no relation to Joseph E. Johnston, another Confederate general.
Shiloh is described by historian Shelby Foote in “The Civil War” thusly:
It was fought in early April. The trees were leafed-out, and the roads were meandering cowpaths. Nobody knew north from south, east from west. They'd never been in combat before, most of them, especially on the Southern side. So it was just a disorganized, murderous fistfight of 100,000 men slammin' away at each other […] The generals didn’t know their jobs, the soldiers didn’t know their jobs, it was just pure determination to stand and fight and not retreat—and the bloodiness of it was just astounding to everyone. It also corrected the Southern misconception which had said one good Southern soldier was worth ten Yankee hirelings. They found out that wasn’t true by a long shot.
Surratt was the first woman executed by the U.S. federal government. The conspiracy had targets beyond Lincoln: George Atzerodt was supposed to kill VP Andrew Johnson but wussed out, and Lewis Powell tried but failed to kill Secretary of State William Seward. Both Atzerodt and Powell were also executed.
If you didn’t bother to click the Star Wars: The Phantom Menace link, one thing you might find interesting is that Watto was likely based on the character of Sheik Ilderim. Oh, you don’t remember Watto from Star Wars? Lucky you.
Twelve?! Dang. Some of Wyler’s most important films were from before 1950, including Mrs. Miniver (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), though his film that I’m hip to is the Barbra Streisand breakout Funny Girl (1968).