Ben-Hur [G]

Sometimes it proves harder to favour love and forgiveness over hatred and revenge. This is something that Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur learns when he is falsely accused of an assassination attempt on a Roman governor and sentenced, by his boyfriend friend Messala, to life as a galleys slave. After four years, Ben-Hur is released and returns to Judea with a head and a heart full of hatred and revenge towards Messala. The tyranny of Rome and his own quest to find his abducted sister and mother and wreak revenge upon Messala blinds Ben-Hur towards humanity still left in the world: the power that lies in a stranger giving a parched man water. 

You’ve all heard the phrase ‘bigger than Ben-Hur’? This is where it comes from and let’s just take a quick look at what that actually means. If the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, then this movie is bigger than the Beatles, featuring 350 speaking roles, over 50,000 extras, being nominated for 12 Academy Awards and winning 11 of them, and having a gargantuan budget (the famous chariot race alone cost a million dollars)! It’s the movie that resurrected the drowning and financially inept MGM studios, made an idol of Charlton Heston, and the ‘Ben-His’ and Ben-Hers’ towels were the first example of movie merchandising! Needless to say that this movie is pretty damned big and it’s not difficult to see why! 

Sometimes it proves harder to favour love and forgiveness over hatred and revenge. This is something that Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur learns when he is falsely accused of an assassination attempt on a Roman governor and sentenced, by his boyfriend friend Messala, to life as a galleys slave. After four years, Ben-Hur is released and returns to Judea with a head and a heart full of hatred and revenge towards Messala. The tyranny of Rome and his own quest to find his abducted sister and mother and wreak revenge upon Messala blinds Ben-Hur towards humanity still left in the world: the power that lies in a stranger giving a parched man water. 

I was seriously expecting this to be another overdrawn epic like your Gone With the Wind or Giant, and whilst it is very much like those sorts of movie, it’s a film that I can really see as an epic. This movie is a real epic! Centring on the Gladiator-esque story of the falsely accused man, it’s also a myth-ridden tale of the biblical kind with Jesus Christ (and I quite liked this) as a man who frequently appears, but we never see his face. This touch was something special I thought because it added this sense of mysticism that was actually rather infectious. 

The sets, particularly that of the Roman palaces and the chariot race track were absolutely incredible, though I did have to take points off for the futuristic wheel spikes that worked so much better on Thunder Road in Grease. The famous chariot race scene still stands up all these years later as a monumentally thrilling piece of cinema, packed with adrenaline and violence. 

I do want to point out at this moment that I definitely do not agree with the film’s G rating, if there are any parents out there with ideas of letting their kids see this before they’re thirteen, think again. There’s actually quite a lot of violence for a late 50s flick, we’re talking pools of blood, people being trampled by horses and chariots, slaves and lepers with limbs missing, and the worse bit is that it looks really authentic. 

Starring Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet, Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith, Martha Scott, Cathy O’Donnell, Same Jaffe, Finlay Currie, Frank Thring, Terence Longdon, George Relph, and Andre Morell, Ben-Hur is a real epic filled with absolutely everything: action, drama, romance, miracles, revenge, sacrifice, betrayal, forgiveness, and comedy. It’s definitely a movie that everyone should see once before they die, a real celebrated classic within the cinematic canon, words actually really cannot explain the viewing experience of it.