BEN-HUR

Lamentable as the triumph of Gladiator over deeper material like Amores Perros and Traffic for the Best Picture win at the 73^rd Academy Award was, it could hardly have been surprising to anyone with even a modest understanding of the industry. Epics of the ancient world lead themselves to gigantism and in Hollywood size covers a lot. If Gladiator proved anything else, it’s that in the world of the Academy, some things never change.

            There was much historic evidence to assure Ridley Scott and DreamWorks that they had a sure-fire bet with Gladiator, for its spiritual ancestors dominated both the screen and Awards some forty-five years earlier. Mightiest of all was William Wyler’s Ben-Hur which, similarly, swept away the Oscars in 1959, pushing aside North by Northwest and Some Like it Hot.  It was simply too big to fail, despite its uncertainty in message and limited understanding of its characters.

            This is not to suggest that Ben-Hur is not praiseworthy. Neither is this a complete rebuttal to it being labeled a “thinking man’s epic”. More than anything, however, Ben-Hur is an entertaining circus of a movie with awesome moments and a chariot race sequence that deserves its reputation as a cinematic landmark.

            Wyler, more or less, takes Lew Wallace’s book to heart and follows Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) from his days as a beloved prince in Judea to his imprisonment under Roman rule and his change of heart as he grows from seeking vengeance to finding salvation (a parable for Christ’s salvation of Judea). But Wyler also cuts some of Wallace’s strongest points short and the picture never reaches the level of profundity worthy of a masterpiece.

            Perhaps for the sake of neutrality, Wyler never specifies Ben-Hur’s conversion to Christianity after witnessing the crucifixion of Christ, but he also makes other, less understandable and more damning, cuts at the heart of the picture.

            There is in the relationship between Ben-Hur and Roman commander Messala (Stephen Boyd) a poignant story of childhood friends now torn apart by politics and the dominance of the Roman Empire over the people of Judea, but Messala gets the short end of character development. We know enough about Ben-Hur. He comes from noble blood and loves his people, even treating his slaves well. He resists violence and respects his old friend, but refuses to surrender the land of his people to Rome.

            We are left with a shoddier portrait of Messala. He is an ambitious commander appointed to Jerusalem by Caesar himself. He respects Ben-Hur and honors their friendship, but his loyalty is to the Empire. Messala is a torn man, but the movie jerks his image around from reasonable ruler (“This was their land before it was ours”, he reminds his guard) to tyrannical brute abruptly and without gradual transformation. As a result, any motivation behind his brutality (he arrests Ben-Hur, his mother, and sister, even though he knows their injuring of a Roman general was accidental because he wants to “make examples” of them) is arbitrary. Likewise, there is little understanding of his final decision to help his old friend after being fatally wounded during the chariot race.

             According to The Celluloid Closet, the documentary based on Vito Russo’s 1981 book, Gore Vidal, who worked on the screenplay for a number of weeks, attempted something deeper in the bond between Ben-Hur and Messala that suggested a homoerotic connection; a suggestion that Heston denied and insinuated that Vidal could not have contributed as much given that his tenure as screenwriter lasted only three days.

 From there on it became a minor battle of accounts between Heston and Vidal, who stood by his account.

            “Over the years I have told the story of how I wrote a love story for Ben-Hur and Messala, and how only Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, was told what the scene was about because, according to director William Wyler, ‘Chuck will fall apart’,” Vidal said.

            “In numerous accounts of a marvelously dull life, Chuck has told us of his triumph as Ben-Hur. With each version he adds, alas, new lies. The facts: Ben-Hur was the third picture that I, as a contract writer at M-G-M, wrote for producer Sam Zimbalist. I arrived with Zimbalist and Wyler in Rome not for a ‘trial run’ but as The Writer. Since I could stay only a couple of months, Christopher Fry was on hand to replace me. Zimbalist died in the middle of the picture, and the credits were totally confused.

            “Now my eight weeks in Rome became three days, according to Chuck. This is very bold. But then, recently, in Palimpsest, I did describe how no one at M-G-M wanted him for the film. Only after Paul Newman and Rock Hudson were unavailable did Zimbalist, glumly, accept Heston.

            “Despite Chuck’s denial of the famous ‘love scene’, the reviewers who watched The Celluloid Closet saw very clearly what I had done and said so. Incidentally, one Celluloid Closet producer got a message from homophobe Heston, assuring him that a character he had also ‘acted’ on the screen, Michelangelo, was in no way homosexual. But what is one to do with the spokesperson of the National Rifle Association, who, when he ‘acts’ now, wears two toupees, one on top of the other, in the interest of verisimilitude?”

            The truth is, there is evidence of something deeper going on between Ben-Hur and Messala even without Vidal’s account. They reminisce about their childhood game of throwing a lance (an unmistakable phallic symbol) and intertwine their arms when drinking wine. Be that as it may, it’s unlikely Vidal could have explored this further. Wyler, if he suspected anything, never spoke against it, but it probably would have been stopped dead by Heston.

            In any case, the film’s Achilles Heel was a common one for Wyler; it brings up talking points just to leave them hanging. By undermining Ben-Hur’s conversion to Christianity, Wyler makes a film of a somewhat inconclusive stance. Is his Ben-Hur the story of a kind prince turned vengeful by political tyranny in his ancestral homeland or is it about something bigger? Is it resolved satisfying his hate (he does challenge and defeat Messala at the chariot race) or does he learn to embrace forgiveness after witnessing the crucifixion and the miraculous healing of his mother and sister who were cast out of society when they were discovered to be lepers? Certainly, his family’s cure further muddles our understanding and not just because it’s an odd ending, even for one of forced optimism. If this is about a redeemed Judean and the salvation of his people, the micro focus on a miracle detracts from the bigger picture. Wallace’s message was a religious one; Christ is risen, the people of Jerusalem were saved, and Christianity was born. Wyler’s is more modest. Christ is crucified, two sick women are healed.

            Wyler had some hesitation in tackling a “DeMille picture”, perhaps accounting for his uncertainty with the scope of the thing, but his difficulty in finding a soul for the picture was a reoccurring pratfall in his oeuvre. In The Best Years of Our Lives, for instance, he questioned the benefit of war through the ranting of a detractor at a bar, making claims (e.g. America had no business getting involved in Germany since the Vichy had no beef with the United States) that Wyler, a Jewish immigrant who served in the Air Force during WWII, would certainly have shunned. But Wyler’s exact attitude is hard to guess judging solely by what transpires on film. The only retort to the charlatan’s big mouth is a sock in the nose from a veteran. Effectively, Wyler’s lack of a thoughtful response kills the scene’s power of stimulation.

            Surprised though he may have been, Wyler seemed a likely candidate to direct the remake of Ben-Hur since Sidney Franklin left the project in 1957. Back in 1925, when he had been in America for no more than two years and was not yet a citizen, Wyler had served as assistant director and production manager of M-G-M’s first version of Ben-Hur, one of the most impressive of silent films and a sizeable moneymaker for the studio.

            Even before M-G-M decided on Wyler, however, a remake of Ben-Hur was practically a certainty at the studio by at least 1953. Quo Vadis had been a hit for the studio in 1951 and created a demand for Biblical epics. By the summer of 1953, when M-G-M was in financial straits, this new fad became a solution. Studio president Dore Schary met with general manager E.J. Mannix, Quo Vadis producer Sam Zimbalist, and Nicholas Schenck of Loew’s Inc. to announce plans for a remake of Ben-Hur.

            From the start, Ben-Hur was going to be big. M-G-M treated the picture as their all or nothing gamble and would spare no expense. It was to be filmed in Rome with a budget of $5,000,000. A top ranking cast and crew was considered including Karl Tunberg as screenwriter, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Richard Burton, and Rock Hudson considered for the title role, and Ava Gardner as a hopeful for the female lead.  Surviving stars of the 1925 film, including lead Ramon Novarro who had been living quietly in retirement, offered to travel to Rome as consultants.

            Alas, this vision would prove too grand to keep for the financial and production woes that took M-G-M by storm, pushing the start of production to 1956. It was still possible to shoot in Rome, but the lead hopefuls were all beyond grasp. By the year’s end, Schary parted ways with M-G-M, ending his five year tenure as head of studio.

            Still, the media kept the production of Ben-Hur alive and helped attract bankable names to the lead role including Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas. But by the time Wyler was announced as Franklin’s replacement as director, M-G-M had narrowed their choices for lead down to Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman. Lancaster refused from the outset, thinking the script a “crashing bore”. Zimbalist, who was managing the picture almost single-handedly by now, tried desperately to sign Newman on. Newman was a friend to Gore Vidal (who had now joined the crew as a screenwriter along with Christopher Fry, Maxwell Anderson, and S.N. Behrman) , but even as such he could not bring himself to appear in another Biblical epic after his disastrous experience with Warner’s The Silver Chalice in 1955. 

            It was at this point that Heston came into the picture, in large part because of his previous collaboration with Wyler in The Big Country. With the casting of Heston in January of 1958, things finally seemed to be falling into place. Irish actor Stephen Boyd was cast as Messala and Israeli actress Haya Harareet was guaranteed to be making her Hollywood debut as Esther, Ben-Hur’s former slave turned lover.

            The initial budget estimate had more than doubled by the start of production, but the buzz that this generated for Ben-Hur, which was being touted as the most expensive film of all time, proved to be effective advertising. While the media kept the anticipation of Ben-Hur sizzling in the States, the crew was hard at work in Rome’s Cinecittà, where M-G-M had filmed Quo Vadis. Now, the M-G-M crew needed Cinecittà to house the 18 acre set they built recreating Jerusalem after filming was suspended in Israel.

            For filming, M-G-M took out the big guns. The camera they trusted for the extreme wide angle shots they were striving for was their own; the MGM Camera 65, named for its capability to shoot at 65mm and equipped with new lenses built by Panavision especially for Ben-Hur to capture footage with sharply. 

            Even in the soundtrack department, Ben-Hur broke barriers with over three hours of music by Miklos Rosza, who said of his work; “Ben-Hur with its sweeping human dramas, personal conflict and pageantry, needed music which grew out naturally from its atmosphere and became an integral part of it. All the music which is used on scene I wrote in Rome. For inspiration I walked long afternoons in the Forum Romanum and other places of Roman antiquity.”

            For all the grief it put M-G-M through during five years of production (Sam Zimbalist died of a heart attack in November of 1958 while working on the film in Rome; a tragedy certainly not helped by the turbulent rode to the completion of the picture), Ben-Hur paid off financially not only for M-G-M but restored other studio’s faith in epics as cash cows. The next few years saw a number of them, most notable among them Universal’s Spartacus. M-G-M was well rewarded for their faith and gamble when its box-office earnings exceeded calculations.

            On its own end, Ben-Hur is a big fun handsome film. Despite its shortsightedness, there is more substance to the leads than was typical in big studio splurges. Ben-Hur himself especially benefits from what is arguably Charlton Heston’s best performance.

            But the film’s greatest accomplishments are all a matter of cinematic wizardry. The visual triumphs of the legendary chariot race scene are not just triumphs for their own end but the very realism they create sucks the viewer into the carnage and terror in a way that could not have been possible without M-G-M’s push for camera superiority. In a visual sense, we are tossed beneath the horse hooves and wooden wheels along with the trampled riders. It’s a roller-coaster of a sequence done with subtle but brilliant audience manipulation tactics; our response to it depending on the camera’s point of view. When the eye of the camera is on the benches, we get caught up by the rousing action and share in our excitement with the other spectators. When the lens takes us into the arena, we feel as endangered by the brutal games as Ben-Hur and his competitors. Our constant shifting from cheer to fear makes for one of the greatest spectacles the movies have ever offered. And it didn't come easy.

            Three months were spent on training the actors (and by all accounts Heston became an adept charioteer by the end of the shoot) and seventy-eight horses. A Roman company was contracted to build eighteen chariots, some of them used only for the training. In the end, the ten minute sequence required the use of as many as 7,000 extras, created a dispute over directorial credit between the two co-directors assigned to it (Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt), destroyed one of the $100,000 cameras built for the film, and caused the injury of three members of the crew. But it immortalized the film.

            The other classic scene is the sweeping though unnervingly claustrophobic shot of Ben-Hur and other sweaty prisoners oaring a Roman battleship below deck. Filmed in a lake built in Cinecittà, the scene impresses not so much for its realism (it’s suffering in the way Hollywood heroes suffer, after all, with movie blood and no togas), but for the way the horror creeps up. Before it rams the Roman ship, we see the approaching Macedonian enemy ship through a tiny window below deck, sharing the view with the oarsmen chained there. We can see the inevitable doom coming and know that while some soldiers may escape the prisoners (and Wyler cleverly “puts us” in the same spot as the prisoners) are trapped and will not be able to escape death but only watch it come.

            Ben-Hur is able to escape when the enemy ship crashes into the wall and we follow him above deck where he rescues commander Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins), but the shot of the doomed prisoners’ arms as they desperately wave for help that never arrives from a shaft on the sinking ship’s floor is harrowing in a way that only a truly humanistic director knows how to be. Paradoxically, it says something about Wyler’s limitation as a director that he follows this scene with a disturbingly confused scene. Quintus Arrius and Ben-Hur escape the battle and before being rescued make peace while adrift at sea. Upon arrival in Rome, Quintus Arrius adopts his savior and makes him a Roman. The juxtaposition of tone would not be so jarring but for a brief moment that betrays everything we have come to know of Ben-Hur up to that point. Upon climbing aboard the Roman ship, the Judean sees the prisoners below deck, remembering that he once was one of them but is now in the good graces of Rome. Does he feel he has betrayed his people or is he simply relieved not to be chained any longer? It’s an impossible moment to grasp because of Wyler’s own dismissal of the implication.

            There is little levity in Ben-Hur, the only hint at humor is at the expense of Hollywood’s favorite stock type, the hot-headed Arab (Hugh Griffith); here a sheik with the finest horses in Judea. He befriends Ben-Hur and trains him for the chariot race. The rest, as they say, is movie history.

            For all its narrative and humanitarian shortcomings, Ben-Hur is a movie milestone. If nothing else, it brought attention to technology as a filmmaker’s magic wand, no matter how shallow the core. Of course, this legacy is a mixed blessing at best and a case could be made that Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments contributed to the rise of big budget as a cover for small ideas. But for all his trouble with the soul of the film, Wyler pulled off a rousing picture with more complexity than DeMille would have bothered with. For better or worse, Ben-Hur is the kind of movie measured mostly by its legacy and in this regard it has few competitors. Its greatest contributions to cinema are two sequences that deserve a top ranking place on any list of cinematic landmarks.