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IMAGINING MOTIVATION William Wyler’s Ben-Hur—a hugely successful MGM CAMERA 65 roadshow, with souvenir booklets, stagebills, Ben-Hur candy bars, special Saturday morning Christian-indoctrination showings for parochial school students, and for two years the top holiday attraction at downtown movie palaces. Certified by the Academy as its most honored movie until 1997’s Titanic and 2003’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, in retrospect it’s pretty thin stuff—a spectacle big on hate and limited on spectacle. Not so much a tale about the Christ as a tale of two boyhood friends who as adults become estranged through betrayal and seek vengeance upon one another. As with Lew Wallace’s novel, political tyranny wants to be the central ailment to be cured by the redemptive words and death of the supposed savior. Easier said than achieved, as Wyler’s difficulties with the script are legendary: while Karl Tunberg gets sole credit, Christopher Fry, S.N. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson and producer Sam Zimbalist worked on it, trying to find the “pivot” eluding them to make sense of Wallace’s cascading consequences. Thanks to rascal Gore Vidal, who as a MGM contract writer at the time was sent to Rome to bridge the causation gap while the production was filming, unrequited passion emerges as covert issue which sets in motion the calamities. He’s not, however, exclusively responsible for our over-awareness of the not so subliminal shorthand. Just about every principal Roman is effete with bangs or curls, and Rome’s soldiers and their tricks are the gamut of beefcake tops and obedient bottoms. Stephen Boyd’s Messala isn’t the only one who has a thing for Charlton Heston’s Ben-Hur: lustful eyes are exhibited by Jack Hawkins’ Arrius as he spots, whips and then ganders at Ben-Hur during galley exercises and later waking to find the star rower hovering over him in his cabin, though these teases get wisely repressed when announcing he’s “adopted” his Jewish prince as slave after becoming Rome’s most celebrated charioteer. With lipsy Frank Thring as Pontius Pilate in attendance at the news, the on-going innuendo gets amusingly affirmed. Whether this is all meant to be Vidal jujitsu is dependent on our having read Wallace’s interminable Christian propaganda, which isn’t very clear about what the central antagonisms are, either, and/or, as backup, have viewed the silent movie version, during which audiences have been known to laugh heartily as Novarro and Bushman look rather longingly at one another, and will wonder if the nude in the ship’s galley is reward for hard rowing. Neither Boyd nor Hawkins available to confirm if they received quiet instructions from Vidal or Wyler to suggest jilted wannabe lovers, or risked adding the luxuria on their own. Wyler had little to offer in the way of clarification other than perfunctory denial. Heston sometimes angrily contested Vidal’s contributions were ever used—differing dramatically from the praise he offered him in The Actor’s Life—and there’s the comically plausible oft-told story told by others that Wyler cautioned the actors not to mention any aberrant overtones to Heston. (Miklós Rózsa apparently had an inkling as his “Friendship” theme leans toward amatory.) Because of various rewrites, Wyler as well as Heston went out of their way to attempt to keep Tunberg from getting lone screenplay credit, necessitating the Screen Writers Guild to intervene. The false impression that lingered was Tunberg hadn’t been around after he completed the first drafts; in fact, he was in Rome for rewrites during filming, though no one remembered what he contributed while there. Fry was also in Rome during filming, primarily changing the dialogue from trite modern to antiquity fakespeak, and was the last writer known to work on the script. Wyler, who claimed SWG politics gave fellow union member Tunberg the edge, fought for Fry to be credited as co-writer. (Wouldn’t be the first time Wyler tried to block a scriptwriter from getting credit: after Michael Wilson adapted Jessamyn West’s Friendly Persuasion, he became ineligible for screen credit because he was blacklisted during the hot political McCarthy era, with Wyler trying to assert his own brother wrote a significant part of the script, a claim the SWG rejected.) Though the battles over dissatisfaction in the Ben-Hur script left the premise of the motivation for the underlining tension unsolved, it isn’t a damaging factor in the 1925 silent movie version. Nor in the 2016 remake: stripped of worrisome implications, Toby Kebbell’s Messala is mightily incensed when his explicit orders to Jack Huston’s Judah—to make clear to his fellow countrymen that peace with Roman rule in Judea is better than the alternative—have been deliberately ignored. Made dull by its jaundiced visuals and non-stars, the 2016 version, like the 1925 epic, is more faithful in keeping Messala alive after the chariot race and to the wishful politics of religious conversion of Jews to Christianity in Wallace’s book, the most popular American novel until Gone with the Wind. Wallace eventually gets to the vindictive Roman’s fate: Balthasar’s daughter Iris, who has become Messala’s mistress, is willingly used to instigate schemes to ruin his arch enemy after being defeated in the arena but later, telling Ben-Hur’s wife Esther of increasing revulsion to his evil ways, she felt compelled to kill him. Their collusion isn’t alluded to in the brief snippets of uncredited Marina Berti as Flavia, changed from Iris, but it’s in the description under a lovely Joseph J. Smith sketch in the 1959 souvenir book as “The Wanton, whose beauty was the trap set for Ben-Hur.” (Zimbalist’s alleged paramour since 1951’s Quo Vadis, Berti became disposable after he died at 57 from a heart attack during filming in Rome in 1958.) We have to thank whoever should get the credit for not permitting Messala’s disposition to be anticlimactic on screen. If, however, Academy members were promoting ecumenicalism by honoring Hugh Griffith’s Sheik with an Oscar, it’s an act of theft against Boyd’s unmitigated cruelties—particularly his whipping of Heston in the arena and his unsurpassed final exhale of hatred—which should have earned super satisfying culmination as this picture’s major supporting act. Sam Jaffee, as Haya Harareet’s father, has a very moving moment when breaking down at Heston’s return from the presumed dead; as moral contrast, Frank Thring’s self-confessed “particular talents” will be optimized at the chariot smackdown. Heston’s Oscar is an establishment of undoubted monarchal presence, the industry’s acknowledgement as the king of the epics, belonging more to the history of someone else’s past than belonging to our contemporary age. There’s no other American actor who can better redeem togas, caftans, laurel wreaths and the handling of props and horses. One of the documentaries included in the deluxe Blu-ray package has someone saying it’s impossible to keep our eyes off him. Standing on the life-preserving ship remnant as raft following a sea battle during which he saves whipper Hawkins, we aren’t thinking so much about whose ship he’s waving down as we are recognizing the motivation of Messala’s coded hankerings. In 2007’s Man in the Chair, Christopher Plummer finally sets us straight: “You never could act in pants, Chuckles.” Beware of inexcusable edits, even on TCM, whose Latin division strips overture, entr’acte and exit music and cuts dialogue in scenes. MGM CAMERA 65 is better known as Ultra Panavision. (Opening 12/23/1959 at the Michael Todd, running 74 weeks; a return hardticket engagement started 2/26/1969, lasting 16 weeks.) Oscar wins: best picture, actor, supporting actor, director, color photography, costumes, art-set direction, dramatic musical score, editing, sound and special effects. Oscar nomination: best adapted screenplay.
The chariot race itself has definitely received the most attention from the 4K restoration. We think we’re seeing more than we ever have but, scene for scene, there aren’t any additions. It’s that we feel closer to the action, more vividly enabled by the Ultra Panavision 2.79:1 ratio, re-overwhelmed by an insider’s view of what’s taking place in the arena. Suppose we should be getting ready for the inevitable 8K, as possibly an experience in ersatz 3D. Might be fun shifting in our seats to avoid Messala’s whip. ROLL OVER IMAGES
Text COPYRIGHT © 2000 RALPH BENNER (Revised 5/2026) All Rights Reserved.
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The Fiftieth Anniversary Blu-ray of Ben-Hur seems mostly a winner, if you haven’t seen the 2026 4K restoration. For example, William Horning and Edward Carfagno’s sets are benighted: the darker the Roman quarters, the dungeon, the interiors of the galley and Ben-Hur’s residence in disrepair the greater the affects and effects. In 4K, they’re considerably less dimmed; and the once darkened last moments of Messala could seem less efficaciously deserved. The chariot arena and its ornamentals look spectacular, with Thring’s Pilate quite at home in it, and Messala’s nasty blades attached to his chariot gleam (though not as humorously as in the Blu-ray of De Mille’s The Ten Commandments, wherein the blinding bling is ready for auction). The engineering behind Blu-ray and 4K unintentionally exposes fakery; it’s like X-raying the shoddiness, as the glass shots, painted flats and miniatured backgrounds become pitifully unconvincing, especially in the House of Hur, Quintus Arrius’s Roman palace and, oddly in 4K, one particular shot of mountainous stone surrounding the arena (after Messala’s death) really jars. Then again, 4K gives us the sand on the House of Hur’s inner patio floor left by sandals. In Blu-ray, the sea battle is a combination of sets, faux battle ships and a rigged galley with some dummies so incredulous that all of it looks like gross dereliction in the art of counterfeiting. In 4K, these are slightly less problematic as surrounding detailing eases out the fake. (The 2016 remake effectively uses CGI in sea battle to eliminate the dummies.) In both Blu-ray and 4K, the leprosy of Ben-Hur’s mother and sister ultra ineffective when realizing they’ve spent five years deep in the bowels of a nauseatingly unsanitary dungeon, its blackened graininess over the doorway seething with germs, yet the contagion is about three quarters to miracle by the time he rescues them from the sealed off valley. In previous VHS and DVD releases the bogus blocks of stone walls for Judea appear unobtrusive; in Blu-ray they look inordinately artificial and spotless—emphatically Cinecittà built, and what the set designers for HBO’s Rome took careful note to avoid. The 4K brings a few surprises—some of the prison walls away from the lower levels of lurking disease suggest a faint cover of mold and mildew, and when in his military quarters Messala removes the spear Ben Hur throws toward a cabinet, we no longer see the distracting natural lighter wood hidden under the paint. Both Blu-ray and 4 K give depth to the cracks in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s brush strokes during the credits, and more so in 4K the opening birth-of-Christ sequence is a series of colossal Xmas cards. With Dolby Atmos in the 4K version, the sound effects are standouts—particularly the sloshing of the shitted-up water in the dungeon and its water dripping from God knows where; the whips lashing on all the bare skin; the galley chains; and the chariot race which was originally filmed MOS, meaning no sound was recorded during the filming but added in postproduction. There’s one exception: the crowd’s response to Messsla whipping Judah lacks the punch of the immediacy of indignation as defiance to the “no rules in the arena” allowance. (And reminding us that half of the spectators don’t see the outrage.) With Wyler reportedly having re-edited moments to enhance its power shortly before the premiere, and those might include the love scenes between Judah and Esther, Miklós Rózsa’s score keeps its soft romance as well as strength; unfortunate is the insistent marching strains accompanying the Roman troops, still annoyingly loud, redundant and not improved in 4K. 
