Red Horizons

Red Horizons, by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa.  Former head of DIE, the Romanian foreign intelligence agency (their CIA/KGB).  He defected from Romania to the US in 1978 and eventually wrote a book about all the nasty stuff his boss, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, was up to during his reign from 1965-1989.  Here are some of the most interesting points:

1.         Yasser Arafat.  Major league homo.  Along with J. Edgar Hoover, another grotescquely ugly homosexual.  Who says they are all handsome perfect saints?  Arafat told Ceausescu that the Palestinians were not ready for their own state and any such state, if created, would be an immediate and complete failure.  Realizing this, however, he was still pushing for Israel’s eradication and refused to agree to any recognition of Israel.  Ceausescu was angling to mediate between Begin and Sadat, i.e. to take the role that Carter would eventually have; instead of a Camp David accord, it would have been a Bucharest accord, and hopefully result in a Nobel Peace Prize for him.  However, we all know who ultimately won that competition.  (In Nelson’s voice: “HA HA!”)

2.         Ceausescu and Arafat were good friends: Pacepa said they were very much alike.

3.         Ceausescu stuttered when he was nervous or under pressure.  His wife, Elena, was a total cunt with delusions of being a scientist; she weaseled various channels to get phony “honorary degrees” and had scientific textbooks ghostwritten in her own name; yet knowing how bogus this all was, still considered herself to be a shining scientific mind in her own right.

4.         The Romanians were the vanguard of the Warsaw Pact’s attempt to steal Western technology for their own military and industrial uses: the top of the industrial espionage tier.  To try to get these secrets, Ceausescu tried to pretend to the West that Romania was independent of the USSR and striving to be even more so, as if Romania would use any such assistance received from the West to promote its independence.  The reality was that it was a game: the Soviets depended on the satellites to get them what they themselves could not get from the West; far from using this technology against the Soviets, the Romanians had every intention of sharing it with them to get favors in return, in a mutual bargaining relationship which continued behind the scenes.   Ceausescu’s predecessor, Georghe-Dej, managed to use a particularly fantastic piece of espionage-theft from the West to get Krushchev to remove Soviet troops from Romania.

5.         Another element was influence.  The usual deal with foreign intelligence is the goal of stealing enemy military technology.  But Ceausescu believed influence was just as important.  INFLUENCE to get US to give Romania favorable trade terms and lower its restrictions on technology transfers. 

6.         Qadafi hated Araftat.  Ceausescu had a great relationship with Mr Libya.

7.         They had three kids.  Valentin and Zoia were actually fairly well adjusted (and embarrassed by their parents).  Valentin was educated overseas and had no use for Marxism.  Zoia managed to discover what life was like for the ordinary Romanians and wasn’t too keen on abusing the system; she tended to have anti-communist boyfriends her parents hated (somewhat like the older daughter in “Beautician and the Beast”).  Younger son Niku was the enfant terrible: boozing, whoring, etc. abusing his position to get whatever he wanted.  Total asshole. Remarkably, despite (maybe because of) his behavior, they considered him perfect to replace his father as ruler of Romania.  They were notorious nepotists.

8.         Ceausescu was heavily anti-Hungarian and anti-Semitic.  He loved “Kojak” and other American crime TV shows.

9.         His wife was very contemptuous of the US, and of Carter and his wife in particular, who she referred to as Mr. & Madame Peanut; there were thought of as peasants, and the weakness of the US system was that even a peasant could end up running the country.  Sounds a bit elitist, doesn’t it?  Aren’t the communists the proud champions of workers and peasants?  Clueless woman.  Overall they looked down on the US.  Hmmm...how many wars has Romania won?  Less than one?  What does Romania have to be proud of, compared to the US?  See, this is arrogance where there is nothing to justify it.  Of course, part of their antipathy to Carter may have been this rivalry to mediate in the Middle East (as noted above).

10.        Also, Ceausescu – probably copying a cue from the Chinese – was cozying up to Nixon, and was super pissed when Congress forced him out of office, undoing all the hard work he had done establishing the personal rapport with Nixon. He did have a problem with US presidential term limits: the maximum amount of time any US President would have in office is 8 years, so every 4 or 8 years Ceausescu would have to start all over.  When it came to Congress, he only focused on influencing Senators (6 year terms) and not Representatives (2 year terms).  He tried to characterize Romania as a “maverick” within the Soviet Bloc and curry favor among Western countries.  Some of it worked, but it dried up when Pacepa defected.

11.        The bright sides are the following:

            A.         The author was the head of DIE, equivalent to the Director of Central Intelligence (CIA Director) – and the highest level East Bloc official to ever defect.  He has all the juiciest details on all the shit Ceausescu was up to, so when he defected, he fucked up Ceausescu big time.  The day he arrived in the US he told the FBI about all the secret ops Ceausescu had all over the US and Western Europe.  He notes that defections and anti-Ceausescu demonstrations drove Ceausescu nuts, physically ill and vomiting.  I can only imagine what happened when Pacepa himself defected.  His defection essentially destroyed the DIE and it never recovered.

            B.         We know now what happened to Ceausescu and his wife, so we know the story has a happy ending.

12.        Ceausescu and his wife visited the US in 1978.  On the trip to New York, his hotel (the Waldorf-Astoria) was surrounded by anti-Ceausescu protesters – Romanians and Hungarians, putting aside their usual mutual ethnic antipathy to attack a mutual enemy – and his limo was pelted with eggs and tomatoes, which really pissed him off.  He complained to the US State Dept., which referred him to Ed Koch, who was then the Mayor (somehow they couldn’t grasp that this was the Mayor’s responsibility, not Carter’s).  Koch was totally cool when he spoke to them in person.  “Hey, they protest me, they protest Carter, no one thinks twice about it.  What’s the big deal?  It was just eggs and tomatoes.”  Ceausescu wanted the protestors shot; his advisors, and the US, said, “uhh, you can’t do that here.” 

13.        When they visited Dallas, Texas, Ceausescu was terrified; this was the city where Kennedy was assassinated (“Texas is the reason the President’s dead!!”).  Apparently he felt Dallas was some dangerous wild place where the local population routinely killed Presidents who visited, and that security was non-existent.  For the record, only three US Presidents were assassinated, and the score is Washington, DC 1 (Lincoln, 1865); Buffalo, New York 1 (McKinley, 1901); and Dallas, Texas 1 (Kennedy, 1963).  I suppose DC gets a half point for Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Reagan, but this hadn’t happened by the time Ceausescu was there.  As it was, we know that Ceausescu and his wife were shot in the capital, Bucharest...not in Dallas.

14.        I was watching TV in Paris with my friend Phil at his family’s house back around 1982-83.  The news came on with footage of French TV from 1974.  It was in black & white!  Shit, 1974, and French TV was still in black & white!  Well, the Romanians have the French beat.  As late as 1978, Romania was one of two countries in Europe (Albania the other) to still broadcast TV in black & white.  The Ceausescus refused to budget money to change over, believing that color TV was a luxury the Romanian people didn’t need.

 With the recent execution of Saddam Hussein, Ceasescu’s fate comes into context: of all the other dictators and tyrants in modern history, aside from Saddam, the only two to face execution were Mussolini and Ceausescu.  Mussolini was killed, and his corpse hanged in public in Milan for the Italian population to spit upon.  Ceausescu was shot in private surroundings and his body (along with Elena’s) put in a mismarked grave.  His corpse was photographed and the photo widely circulated so that the Romanian people could see for themselves that he was DEAD and not hiding away somewhere or in exile.  He escaped Mussolini’s fate. Milosovic and Pinochet “ran out the clock”; Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pot all died natural deaths; and Hitler, Goering and Himmler committed suicide, cheating the hangman (literally, in Goering’s case).  The odds of a dictator facing any sort of justice, “victor’s” or otherwise, are extremely slim.  Saddam was executed in private, by hanging (a fairly mundane and unspectacular means of execution) and his body discreetly returned to Tikrit.  He was not publicly executed; he was not summarily shot as he was captured in his spider hole; and he was granted at least the pretense of a trial.  He got off easy, as it is.  He deserves no sympathy or apologies, nor should any apology be made for the trial or the execution.  

Blue Cheer

I saw this band for the second time on Tuesday night at the Black Cat, a club on 14^th Street in downtown DC.  A quality set, fantastic jamming, as I can expect from this band – including extremely loud volume.  I haven’t been disappointed by anything they’ve released or any show I’ve seen.

Intro.  This is a band my friend Ken turned me on to years ago.  He started collecting albums while we were still at University of Maryland, College Park; he managed to get me into them a few years after graduation, about the time I was in law school (early 90s).   I started off with The Beast Is Back, a comeback album from 1985, followed that with the compilation Good Times Are So Hard To Find, and then managed to get all six original studio albums on CD in short enough time to annoy Ken.  Of course, he’s now hanging out with the band on a regular basis, so he’s clearly not complaining anymore.

Style.  They started out as a loud, aggressive rock band, out of the 1967 San Francisco music scene, though shunned and ignored by the mainstream – which focuses on the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and other more aural-friendly acts.  If there was one thing early Blue Cheer was notorious for, it was being LOUD (“Louder Than God”), one of the first bands to line the back of their stages with a wall of Marshall stacks, cranked up to maximum volume.  “They turn the air into cottage cheese,” their Hell’s Angel manager Gut was reported to have claimed.  Iron Butterfly, often compared to Blue Cheer, have noted that they consider Blue Cheer “more of a vexation than an inspiration,” and it seems to the extent they get any attention at all, 80% of it is badmouthing, writing them off as obnoxious noise, using an excess of volume to conceal a lack of talent.  I have to disagree with this blanket assessment.

            Unfortunately, after three albums of fairly original material, they drifted off into commercial oblivion for the second three albums before disbanding in 1971.  Their last album of this era, Oh! Pleasant Hope, reads like a cover of each of the most popular bands at the time.  Not bad (I really like this album), just not original.

            When they reformed in 1985 with Dickie Peterson, Paul Whaley, and Tony Rainier for The Beast Is Back, the distortion was back on, the Marshalls cranked to 11, and they have continued to remain loud and proud since then.  They’re frequently cited as the “first heavy metal band” – before Black Sabbath – and compared to their contemporaries, especially such “heavy” ones as Cream and Iron Butterfly, they are certainly the heaviest of that era.   Likewise, they continue the heavy blues-based rock.  Of course by now, we have Metallica, death metal, etc., so Blue Cheer are no longer the heaviest act around – but they’re certainly competitive.  They clearly succeeded at making the transition from 60s rock to contemporary metal, without simply copying the hair, thrash, or New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands.  They have their own sound.

            I wouldn’t, however, call them psychedelic, even if they are named after an LSD variant, as they never dissolve into the kind of space jams we expect from Pink Floyd, Hawkwind or the Grateful Dead.  The closest to this is the extended jam song “Doctor Please”, from Vincebus. 

Albums.  The original six albums (1968-71), are Vincebus Eruptum, Outsideinside, New! Improved!, Blue Cheer, The Original Human Being, and Oh! Pleasant Hope.  Then modern era (1985-) is The Beast Is Back, Highlights and Lowlives, Blitzkrieg Over Nuremburg (live), Dining With The Sharks, Live In Japan ’99 (live), Bootleg: Live Hamburg-London (live), and their most recent studio album, What Doesn't Kill You. 

Lineups.  The focal character of all BC lineups to the present is bassist/vocalist Dickie Peterson.  There would be no Blue Cheer without Dickie – he IS Blue Cheer.  He’s honest, down-to-earth, and very cool, considering who he is.  A remarkable survivor.  He sprinkles the concerts with thoughtful commentary between songs – it’s like he teleported here from San Francisco, 1967, but still knows exactly where he is.

            They’ve had various drummers, with Paul Whaley being the original and most consistent.  The popular legend was that they had to nail his drums down, he hit them so hard.  He’s more from the Keith Moon & John Bonham school of heavy drumming.  Lately Joe Hasselvander of Pentagram has been filling in for Whaley, though as of now Whaley is back in the group.

            The original guitarist was Leigh Stephens, who plays on the first two albums.  He was followed by Randy Holden (half of New! Improved!), Bruce Stephens (no relation to Leigh) (the other half of New! Improved!  and Blue Cheer), Gary Yoder (The Original Human Being and Oh! Pleasant Hope); Tony Rainier (The Beast Is Back) and Dieter Saller (Dining With The Sharks); and finally Duck McDonald, the current guitarist, who has now been with the band for over 20 years and can play Leigh Stephens’ material better than Leigh himself. He started off as a George Lynch kind of poser, but ended up more of a laid-back, blues-based guitarist.  He plays Stratocasters through Marshall amps, the classic combination.

 Again, what’s remarkable about this band is that they were the heaviest of their time originally – 1968-71 – yet have recaptured that throne even today, and still kick ass, one of the few bands to earn that distinction.

Al Aurens

“Al Aurens” – better known as T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia” - was a hero to his Arab comrades and a thorn in the side of the Turks, to the point where a 20,000 pound bounty was put on his head by the Turks.  Yet the Turks themselves captured him, tortured him (possibly sexually assaulted him) and let him go, not realizing who he was.  And ultimately Lawrence won.

 WWI – Background.  By 1916, World War I had been going on for almost three years.  The Western Front (Germany on one side of the trenches, France and England on the other) was reduced to stalemate.  Could another front be opened to force a strategic victory?  Russia was already tied up dealing with Germany (including two brilliant generals, Ludendorff & Hindenburg) and Austria-Hungary.  The third Central Power, Turkey (known as the Ottoman Empire at this time) was overextended throughout the Middle East.

 Turkey.  Long the “sick man of Europe”, the Ottoman Empire had lost the Balkans in the l9th century but still held on to two long stretches of territory running southward from modern-day Turkey: one going southeast into what is now Iraq; and one going due south, including Syria, Lebanon, Israel (aka Palestine), Jordan, and much of Saudi Arabia.  The Turks had hitched their star with the Central Powers; Germany provided supplies, Mauser rifles, a small air force, engineers, artillery, machine guns, and some badly needed advisors on how to run a modern war machine.  With the exception of fighting off the badly planned Gallipoli campaign (Churchill’s project – which temporarily sidelined his political career) the Turks seemed incapable of doing much more than slaughtering innocent Armenians.

 Arabs.  Who would oppose the Turks?  The Arabs were disorganized, had no national identity or leader.  They were decentralized into various tribes, many of whom hated each other more than they hated the Turks (who, though Muslim, are NOT Arabs).  The tribal leaders looked out for their own best interests and those of the tribe’s, even to the point of collaborating with the Turks.  The closest one to a “leader” among the Arabs was Prince Feisal, but even with his vast skills and wisdom, he could not unite the Arabs by himself.

 Lawrence.  It took an outsider, an Englishman, to come in and do for the Arabs what they could not do for themselves: unite into a coherent military force (albeit very irregular) and beat the Turks – kicking them out of Arabia, out of Jerusalem, and out of Damascus.  Lawrence spoke fluent Arabic, had travelled the region extensively before the war, and above all, understood the Arabs and their tribes.  He also understood – far more than any of the Europeans – that any such revolt had to be BY the Arabs, FOR the Arabs.  Ultimately British troops were involved, under General Allenby, in the conquest of Palestine and Syria, but the forces which liberated Arabia from the Turks and gave the whole regional campaign its initial force and strength, were Arab tribes recruited and organized by Lawrence.  He understood their strengths and weaknesses, and though nominally a British advisor sent only to observe, he became a de facto leader of the guerilla forces not merely terrorizing the Turkish forces, but in several cases – including Akaba – actually driving them out of entire strongpoints.  And he did this of his own initiative.

            Of course, his most distinguishing feature, which immortalizes him in our imaginations, is wearing Arab dress and riding a camel.  In the movie, he even shows up at the officer’s club in Cairo, goes right up to the bar in full Arab dress, and orders a lemonade for himself and his young companion, much to the alarm and surprise of the other British officers.  At first an oddity and curiosity, this affectation becomes his trademark and a source of wonder and admiration.

 Book & Movie.  Lawrence wrote a book about his experiences, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  It’s VERY LONG and very verbose.  Suffice to say that if you can endure it (as I did) you’ll come away with a much stronger understanding of how difficult it was to raise this army, equip it, play off various tribal leaders against each other, satisfy skeptical British generals back in Cairo, and still keep alive after blowing up trains and thirsting on a camel out in the desert.  The movie, with Peter O’Toole as Lawrence, Alec Guiness as Prince Feisal, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quinn, and many others, did a great job of telling the story in a dramatic fashion, although even the movie itself is rather long – almost 4 hours.  There were a number of elements in the book which the movie could not address:

 * Bisexuality.  The two boys, Daud & Farra, who accompanied Lawrence and acted as his “servants”, were more than just friends.  Many of these Arabs, off in the desert for weeks on end with no contact with women, facing death, violence, heat, thirst – all the dangers of this hostile environment – ultimately had to turn to each other for their physical needs. 

            Was Lawrence himself bisexual?  I thought O’Toole’s portrayal in the movie made him appear to be.  His own book does not delve into that, though it does refer, occasionally, to that of the Arabs (not at length, however).  The way he describes his capture in Deraa, the Turkish commander wanted him to come to bed, but had him beaten when he refused; the inference from what was not stated was that Lawrence was sexually assaulted, not merely beaten and tortured.  But this is merely an inference.

 * Turkish incompetence. The Turkish soldiers were of low morale, the officers were unimaginative and nonaggressive.  Any backbone or competence came from Germans in their midst.  The one time Lawrence praises the performance of enemy forces, it’s a small nucleus of German machine gunners.

 * Arab Tribal Politics and European Duplicity.  The movie skims across this, but fairly well.  Anthony Quinn (as Auda abu Tayi) and Omar Sharif (as Ali ibn al Kharish) face off against each other more than once.  Lawrence goes into the considerable detail about this.  Indeed, it appears that between  him and Prince Feisal, they have a 24/7 job of keeping the coalition (!) together long enough to succeed at anything beyond blowing up a railroad.  Each of the tribes was mainly in it for money or its own interests, NOT any sort of abstract loyalty to a nationalist cause. 

            Lawrence was also deeply conscious of his own role in inspiring the Arabs to revolt, yet knowing full well that his British superiors back in Cairo – and in London – had no intention of allowing the Arabs to keep any of the territory they fought so hard to take.  The British were merely using the Arabs to fight the Turks, who were allied with the Germans – England’s enemy in WWI.  So he considered himself a fraud.  Yet since so much of his appeal to the tribes had to be for their own self-interests, and since they cared so little for any overall self-determination, his concern was somewhat misplaced.  The irony was that he cared more for this ideal than the very Arab tribesmen he was organizing, recruiting and leading – on their behalf for this cause - and yet even he knew it was all a fraud after all.  This is part of why Lawrence was extremely embarassed to take any claim, credit, praise, or award for his role in this whole matter.  After the war, he attempted to join the RAF as a common private, but had to leave once they figured out who he was. 

             A great man, Al Aurens, very complex, very brave, a true hero out of history.

Ben Hur

On Good Friday (for those of you who know what I’m talking about), this movie/movie/book should be an appropriate topic.

 I was first introduced to this story in the most mainstream fashion – watching the 1959 film in a movie theater on the Champs Elysees in Paris, sometime in the summer of 1980.  It’s a very long and very intense film – over 2 hours – and I ended up with a splitting headache.

 Very recently (27 years later) I watched the deluxe 4 DVD set.  Discs 1-2 are the 1959 movie (which is the format most people know about).  Disc 3 is the 1925 silent film, somewhat forgotten by now (interestingly impressive in its own right, but overshadowed by the 1959 version), and Disc 4 has the inevitable extra features – of which the most notable segments are Charlton Heston’s premiere appearances and Leslie Nielson (from the “Airplane” and “Naked Gun” films) auditioning for the role of Messala in full Roman gear.

 After digesting all that, I went a step further and read the original novel by Lew Wallace, written in 1880.  Wallace himself was a remarkable character: one of the few Union generals of the Civil War with any real talent and ability; Governor of the New Mexico Territory (met up with Billy the Kid in person); and US envoy to the Ottoman Empire (aka Turkey).  His own story is almost as remarkable as Ben Hur’s.

 Plot.  Judah Ben Hur, Jewish prince, meets his childhood friend Messala, a Roman officer, recently returned from Rome and intent on quelling an incipient Jewish rebellion in Judea, then a Roman province.  When a tile falls from the Hur estate and almost kills the new Roman governor, Messala makes an example of Ben Hur and his family: he has Judah himself sent to the galleys to certain death as a slave; has Ben Hur’s mother and sister locked up in the dungeon, to waste away forgotten; and confiscates the Hur estate, dividing the proceeds between himself and the governor.

 In the galleys, Ben Hur beats the odds and survives three years – when the life expectancy is one – kept alive by hate and vengeance.  His ship is engaged in a naval battle with pirates, yet he survives, and saves the life of the admiral, Quintus Arrius.  The admiral takes him back to Rome, adopts him as his son, and Ben Hur enjoys a lavish lifestyle in Rome, hanging out with the Emperor himself and future Judean governor Pontius Pilate, even gaining experience as a gladiator and chariot driver.

 He returns to Judea seeking revenge against Messala and to find his long-lost mother and sister.  He gets even with Messala by defeating him in a dramatic chariot race – both the 1925 and 1959 movies are great at this – and finds his mother and sister, now lepers.  He also hooks up with a slave girl, Esther.  In the 1925 film she’s played by Mary McAlvoy, a boring white actress.  In the 1959 films she’s played – far more convincingly – by Haya Harareet, an Israeli actress (who doesn’t appear to have done any other movies).  Esther is actually the daugther of Simonides, who was Ben Hur’s father’s slave, but she loves Ben Hur as a man.  Unfortunately for her (at least in the 1925 movie and the book), Ben Hur considers her as a little sister (similar to David Copperfield’s view of Agnes) until the very end.  His attention and affection, for the most part, are attracted to Iras...

 Iras, the Egyptian.  One of the Three Wise Men, Balthazar, is an Egyptian, and survives the other two (Gaspar and Melchior) to witness Christ’s crucifixion.  He also has a beautiful daughter, Iras, who is completely absent in the 1959 movie, has a minor role as Messala’s girlfriend in the 1925 film, and a major role as a competitor with Esther for Ben Hur’s affections in the book.  Basically she plays the seductive evil woman (with Esther the good, yet forgotten woman) plying secrets of out Ben Hur while secretly serving her true love, Messala.  

 Last but not least, enter Jesus.  He’s mostly in the background in the 1959 film (with the exception of his crucifixion, which is fully portrayed, though not with the crisp, pungent realism of Mel Gibson’s treatment), has a somewhat larger role in the 1925 film (the scenes concerning him, Mary & Joseph are colorized), and is most prominent in the novel – the subtitle of which is “A Tale of the Christ”.  He gives water to Ben Hur as the character is led off to the galley; and eventually his crucifixion comes to center focus towards the end of the book.  In particular, the hope Ben Hur and his followers have that Jesus will be a true “King of the Jews” and lead them to overthrow Rome and re-establish a glorious Israeli kingdom is dashed when Jesus is captured and crucified.  Only by inspiration and introspection – and some divine assistance – does Ben Hur realize what Jesus’ mission truly is.  For their part, the mother and sister have faith that Jesus is the Messiah, and thanks to this faith, their leprosy is cured by him (handled differently in the book, the 1925 film, and the 1959 film, but always with the same result).  For this reason, the story is very much an Easter story, which is why I posted this entry at this time.

 Book vs. Two Films.  The 1959 film is by far the best.  The naval battle and chariot race of 1925 are both extremely well done, especially by those standards.  In fact, this movie was compared to “Intolerance”, which I mentioned earlier.  It’s tempting to write off the silent movie, but taken in context it is damn good.  The director of the 1959 movie, William Wyler, was a cameraman for the chariot scene in the 1925 movie.

            The 1925 Ben Hur, Ramon Navarro, does an OK job, but Charlton Heston truly assumed and defined the role.  His Oscar for the role – the film swept the 1959 awards – was well and truly deserved.  Hell, he even learned how to actually DRIVE the chariot for the race scenes. It’s tempting today, particularly among liberals who can’t stand his politics, to write him off, but this was stellar acting on his part.  Forget Moses & the “10 Commandments”; forget “Planet of the Apes” or “Soylent Green” – THIS is Charlton Heston at his best, in a truly classic and epic movie. 

            Then there is Stephen Boyd as Messala.  In both the book and 1925 film, Messala is somewhat older than Ben Hur; you don’t really get a sense that they were ever really peers or friends.  The 1959 film actually changes this in a way that works BETTER than the original.

            With Stephen Boyd and Charlton Heston, they appear to be of the same age, and equals.  The friendship is so obvious and so strong, that it almost has some subtle homoerotic overtones.   In fact, Gore Vidal claims that Boyd had been instructed that the backstory was that Ben Hur and Messala were lovers as younger men, then when they met each other again, Messala wanted to resume the relationship and Ben Hur declined – thus spurned, Messala took his revenge against Ben Hur and his family.  Vidal also claims that Heston was not told about this, thus Boyd was acting on this subtext without Heston’s knowledge or participation.  Others, including Heston, dispute this story, but it seems plausible when you watch the way the actors play the roles.  There are also hints of this in the book, in which Messala describes Ben Hur as extremely handsome and “my Ganymede” (Zeus’ lover boy – a reference which is not only homoerotic but also puts Messala as an older partner to Ben Hur).

            A second improvement of the 1959 movie is Messala’s end.  In the 1925 movie we don’t see what happens to him after his chariot breaks apart.  In the book, he’s crippled, ruined, and dishonored, but doesn’t meet Ben Hur in person after that (Iras meets with Ben Hur on behalf of Messala).  The 1959 movie gives us the dramatic confrontation between Ben Hur and Messala, in which the Roman, with his last breaths, choosing death rather than to have his legs amputated, reveals to Ben Hur that his mother and sister are still alive.  Another remarkable departure from the original which works 10x better. 

            The book is somewhat long-winded and affects the stilted language of late 19^th century English and American writers.  But it also gives a substantial background on all the different topics, including, but not limited to, the Roman dominance over Judea, Judean politics, the city of Antioch, the circumstances of Joseph & Mary coming to Bethlehem, the Three Wise Men, among many other topics, none of which could nearly be addressed by any movie.  The three complement each other well.

 Rome & Israel.  This is a subtext which is fairly latent in the 1959 film, comes up a bit stronger in the 1925 film, but is full-blown in the novel.  Knowing that Jesus is “born to be King of the Jews”, Ben Hur and his comrades, his slave Simonides (a wealthy merchant) and Sheik Ilderim (the Arab whose horses and chariot Ben Hur rode to victory against Messala) plot to support Jesus’ predicted rise to power to overthrow the Romans and bring a Jewish kingdom back to glory.  Among them, only Balthazar realizes early on that the “kingdom” will be spiritual and not temporal. In the 1925 movie, Ben Hur even raises two legions in support of this short-lived rebellion, and appears wearing armor and carrying a spear.  Of course, Jesus’ “kingdom” is not of this Earth, and he is crucified.

            The irony of this is that much, much later, the Roman emperor Constantine first converted to Christianity, then made it the official religion of the (then-waning) Roman Empire.  Among the remaining pagans, a disgruntled theory was that Christianity itself doomed the Empire.  If that were true, then Jesus did, very indirectly, bring about the fall of Rome which they were hoping for centuries earlier; though Rome’s decline was due to far too many different factors to attribute its conversion to Christianity alone a significant factor, if indeed a factor at all.  In any case, Rome, in the form of the Vatican, is the capital of the Roman Catholic faith – de facto Christianity until the schism with the Eastern Orthodox Church (and later Protestant schism in western Europe).  And Israel finally became a country in 1948, fighting off successive waves of hostile Arabs in 1948, 1956, 1967 (the Six Day War), 1973 (the Yom Kippur War), going right up to the present. 

             The book is long and difficult to digest, but contains far more information and background than either movie.  The 1925 movie is worth seeing simply by comparison, and it is a great movie of that era.  But the 1959 movie, with Charlton Heston, really tops all three.