"Where there is greatness, great government or power, even great feeling or compassion, error also is great."
Hollywood was a very different place when Ben-Hur was made. Specifically, it's leading stars were, wait for it—Republicans! It's big box office spectacles? Not science fiction. Not superhero adventures. Not spy thrillers. They were sword and sandal films. This one in particular was made with the story of Jesus Christ serving as it's primary historical backdrop. It's quite genius. What better known historical event is there than the greatest story ever told?
[never mind his divinity but it's pretty much accepted by historians that Jesus was a man, so please...]
[A truly landmark director builds a brand of cinema that influences a whole other generation of filmmakers. There's a school of cinema that Kubrick built that led to Lucas making Star Wars. But Mr. Lucas couldn't just build upon Kubrick he had to make it bigger. After what Lucas and Spielberg did we got a whole other crop of gigantic science fiction and fantasy spectacles: Inception, The Matrix, Blade Runner, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter are a few. There are other examples in other genres. I tried writing those out but the inspirations begin to pile up. Scorsese alone is a combination of Italian (Fellini), some independent American (Cassavetes), a British auteur (Hitchcock), and then some other French New Wave. And we haven't even begun to step into some other Americans like Orson Welles and John Ford. No, I think we'll call it a day and just use Kubrick and Lucas as good examples.]
When Hollywood spent money on something in the old days, it was worth something. One frame of Ben-Hur blows my mind and the film isn't even that expensive. Not adjusted for inflation, it's $15 million. Adjusted, it's apparently $110 million. Last time Hollywood made a spectacle for 110 million...well Shrek 3 cost more than that. An attempt to recreate such a feat would be Troy and Alexander and both those films were upwards of $150 million. I don't mean to simply list budgets all day but it's important to point out the cost of such a film. The movie was big when it came out and it's still big today. Just an example: the aspect ratio of Inception, a film with a large scope and a high budget action spectacle is 2.35:1. Ben-Hur's is 2.76:1 during the famous chariot scene. Such a picture is extremely wide. (How the West Was Won is 2.89:1.)
So when you watch Ben-Hur it's impossible to say, like some do when watching old films that, "oh, well for back then, it must have been something special." No, for now this film is something special. The production is something worth paying attention to. But production by itself isn't really special. Oliver Stone's Alexander was expensive and had some very nice production and great cinematography. Why isn't that film as good as Ben-Hur? Well it boils down to my belief that the screenplay of a film can truly make it or break it.
Ben-Hur's screenplay is epic in every way. Forget the scale and time period and you still have a grand melodrama of Shakespearean virtue (the ending of Romeo + Juliet still gets me). Adapted from a novel that itself adapts a story from Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, it tells the story of an upper class Jew in Rome, Judah Ben-Hur, who is betrayed by his boyhood friend, Messala. After this, Judah swears to right these wrongs but his thirst for revenge goes farther than just his friendship with Messala. He begins to embark on a crusade against the glory of Rome itself. So it's a tale of betrayal, romance, religion, politics, history, philosophy. The writers compliment the production and the actors compliment the tale. Where would actors be without Charlton Heston anyway? Not to mention Hugh Griffith in an outstanding supporting role. Stephen Boyd as Messala is also amazing. He provides a villain for the audience and Ben-Hur to hate, while simultaneously fleshing him out into a credible Roman character.
In addition to the surface, there lies a great deal of subtext. The uncredited screenwriter Gore Vidal, claims that he informed the director, William Wyler, to direct Stephen Boyd to play the role with a homosexual subtext with a back story inspired from his classic novel, The City and the Pillar. The tricky part? Don't tell Heston!
(Heston has denied this claiming that Vidal only wrote one scene. Vidal later refuted this with evidence from Heston's own autobiography where Heston explains, in great detail, how Vidal worked on the script extensively. I think we see why they decided not to tell Heston in the first place.)
Ben-Hur isn't afraid to have a sense of humor either. It's got some of the best lines ever: "One wife? One god, that I can understand - but one wife! That is not civilized. It is not generous!" Or then there's: "You fool! You think you can treat my horses like animals?!"
So Ben-Hur is not merely an "epic." James Cameron simply makes epics. Those are big films, with big effects, an attempt of creating what we'd call "characters" who feel some sort of derivative of what you and I would call "emotions." Perhaps I'm being too harsh on Cameron. I mean I've liked pretty much, all his movies. Not to belittle his brand of epics, but Ben-Hur is an epic that actually includes the grandioseness of a Biblical tragedy. A melodrama at it's core, a beautifully romantic subtext underneath, and a large setting for the telling of the tale. There is a reason why these old films are called "classics." Because they are. They are what made Hollywood for surely you don't think dressing up as a bat could solely sustain a town's legacy?
Ben-Hur is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. Writing, direction, acting, production. It's a film for film connoisseurs and just fans of film in general. It's long, but worth every second. It's impressive, but still entertaining. It's deep but also funny. It's not pretentious but it's ambitious and it's still, and perhaps always will be, marvelous.
And for those that feel the term "masterpiece" is useless because it's soooo biased to older flicks and only used by snobby elitists, I have one reply. It's easy to compare Ben-Hur, Gone with the Wind, and other masterpieces of the era to Greek mythology and classic literature. Many have done it and they'll do it again. But you can't compare some of these "newer" ones and you should really be aware of that. It's not that the comparison may be wrong. It "may actually be true but I can't check it out because, tragically, no really bad Greek tragedies have survived." - Where would we be without dear Ebert?
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