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Hold your horses, Judah, Mai 24 2004
There are those who think that the reputation of the 1959 movie version of Ben-Hur is a victim of its success -- that it's remembered for the chariot race, for being the biggest, the widest, the longest, etc., rather than its ambition to upgrade the historical spectacle genre into a drama of character and the clash between the ancient Roman and Jewish cultures. True enough, the film does seem to try to balance the visual dazzle with a serious sense of purpose, but succeeds in that aim only fitfully.Give the production some credit for making the effort, anyway. William Wyler, one of Hollywood's better commercial practitioners, was hired to direct. There certainly are long stretches of expository dialogue which aren't tarted up with scenery or action. They cast an unknown Israeli actress, Haya Harareet, as the female lead, which was pretty daring for a big-budget epic. (She doesn't set the screen on fire, but she holds up her end well enough, considering that the script gives her only one good line -- you'll know it when you hear it -- and somewhere in the second or third hour I found myself appreciating her.) I understand they brought in several high-class script doctors, including Gore Vidal. Vidal supposedly added a gay element to the relationship between Judah Ben-Hur and Messala, although there is no evidence of it unless you are among those who think that by definition any strong attachment of love or hatred between men must be sublimated homosexuality. In any event, the story line never rises above the serviceable, and sometimes sinks into near suspended animation. I hadn't seen Charlton Heston in a long time, and I was a bit surprised. He shows more acting technique here than I would have expected (probably Wyler deserves credit for it), but he can't carry it beyond technique. His is a completely exteriorized performance, an audio-animatronic version of suffering, revenge and love. The tedium of watching Heston is somewhat relieved by Stephen Boyd, who breathes a reasonable degree of life into the character of his nemesis, Messala. Martha Scott and Cathy O'Donnell, as Ben-Hur's mother and sister respectively, are empty vessels. The only performance you can really savor is by Jack Hawkins, as an aristocratic Roman naval commander who saves Ben-Hur by "adopting" him. Hawkins should have won the best supporting role Oscar instead of Hugh Griffiths, who hams it up as an Arab sheik. So what about the spectacle? Well, the famous chariot race is undeniably one of the best action scenes ever filmed. It's no surprise that it's what everybody remembers from the movie. A second-unit director who knew his business, and the film editor, got the timing and angles just about precisely right. Some of the sets are handsome enough, but for the most part Wyler didn't make particularly good use of the frame's extremely wide aspect ratio (about 2.70 to 1, I'd guess). Considering that the film long predated digital effects, the SFX are decent for their period, although during the too-frequent stretches when the attention wanders, it's hard not to fixate on some obviously painted backdrops. Incidentally, the rocky scenery in the background of the chariot racecourse looks more like Colorado Springs than Rome's Palatine Hill. The DVD transfer was clearly made from a clean new print, the colors often ravishing, but no amount of adjustment of my player's sharpness control could overcome a slight fuzziness in some scenes, although others (especially the action sequences) left nothing to be desired. It is as if the lab that performed the DVD authoring reserved their best efforts for what they considered the money shots.
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