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.