“The entertainment experience of a lifetime,” trumpeted the poster for Ben-Hur upon its release in 1959. It was an absurdly pompous claim that the universe nonetheless did its level best to reward, as if to justify the film-makers’ sheer commitment to scale: at the now quaint-sounding figure of $15m, William Wyler’s epic was at the time the most expensive film (with the largest sets) in Hollywood history, with a marketing budget nearly as high as the production one. Sure enough, audiences and awards voters took them at their word. Ben-Hur swiftly took its place behind only Gone With the Wind in the all-time box office charts, and roared through the Oscars with 11 wins – a record that stood alone until Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King equalled it decades later.
Yet there was an oddly, inadvertently back-handed undertone to that grandstanding: Ben-Hur may have been the entertainment experience of one lifetime, yes, but has it endured through subsequent ones? The biblical spectacular celebrates its 60th anniversary this month, yet it doesn’t feel as broadly celebrated today as other films marking the same milestone: Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, for example, or Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, or Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Those, of course, were better films then and better films now, even if they raked in a fraction of Ben-Hur’s supersized total. They just weren’t events, the kind of films promoted as experiences above all – something that almost any blockbuster only gets to be once, for a year at most, in its long, brawny life.
Shorn of event status, is Ben-Hur a classic, or is it simply a title people know, a signifier of a particular brand of epic cinema? One has to wonder how often the saga of Judah Ben-Hur – from Jewish prince to condemned slave to anguished witness to Christ’s crucifixion – is actually watched today, in all its sprawling, lumbering glory. Everyone knows the chariot race sequence, of course, though I’d guess rather fewer people have actually seen it in context. It only fills nine minutes of the film’s 212, after all: they’re nine thoroughly transfixing minutes, to be fair, a testament to the increasingly rare, tactile thrill of spectacular Hollywood action realised entirely through physical means.
But what else do you remember from the film’s remaining three-plus hours? The arduous rowing in the galleys, most likely. Charlton Heston’s neck veins glistening and threatening to pop at scattered points throughout the narrative, maybe. But if you remember Ben-Hur fondly, chances are you’re selectively forgetting some drab, extended passages – that interminable visit to the leper colony, or any of the wooden, chemistry-free romantic dithering between Heston’s Judah and Haya Harareet’s Esther – or the excruciating (yet Oscar-winning) brownface hammery of Hugh Griffith’s Sheik Ilderim. Burt Lancaster famously turned down the title role because he deemed the script a bore: he wasn’t entirely wrong.
An avowed atheist, Lancaster also dismissed the project as blatant promotion for Christianity – a charge the film-makers had pre-emptively made some effort to address. It was based, of course, on American writer Lew Wallace’s 1880 adventure novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which had already been filmed as a silent epic, under the same title, in 1925. (Then as now, remakes were big business in Hollywood.) It was an overtly Christian text, culminating in Ben-Hur’s miracle-fueled conversion from Judaism to Christianity.
Religious fervour was, of course, no obstacle to box-office success in the 1950s, Ben-Hur having been made in the immediate wake of Cecil B DeMille’s blockbuster The Ten Commandments. Yet shedding that fusty “Tale of the Christ” subtitle was a telling sign that Wyler’s version was aiming for more universal reach. The conversion remains, yet the screenwriters’ strenuous efforts to treat Judaism with measured respect were palpable, while Wyler’s decision to keep Christ an entirely peripheral, faceless figure in the film may have been in line with Wallace’s own wishes, but it also kept the film from feeling too, well, Christian.
Yet by the time Ben-Hur was filmed yet again, only three years ago, it was no longer approached as universally populist entertainment, but expressly tailored for the faith-based audience: a globally marginal market that nonetheless proves continually profitable within America’s borders. Produced by Mark Burnett and former Touched by an Angel star Roma Downey, the husband-and-wife team behind Christian-oriented production company Lightworkers Media, Timur Bekmambetov’s chintzy, loosely adapted new version gave Christ not just a face (a handsome one, courtesy of actor Rodrigo Santoro) but a vastly expanded role. “Expectations of the faithful will be honoured by this one,” said Rob Moore, vice-chair of Paramount, the film’s distributing studio; the tacit admonishment of Wyler’s version for being comparatively secular was all too audible.
Whatever its beefed-up Christian credentials, the new Ben-Hur certainly made the older one look a relative classic: even the chariot race was botched in a swamp of CGI, while its turgid messaging made it feel rather more ponderous. (It was 90 minutes shorter.) To no one’s surprise, it was savaged by critics and tanked at the box office, taking in less than $100m worldwide, and failing even to engage America’s sturdy Christian cinemagoers: since the seemingly anomalous phenomenon of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ 15 years ago, which fed off violence and controversy as much as devotion, no biblical epic has captured the popular imagination on a blockbuster scale. In a little over half a century, the story of Judah Ben-Hur went from world-beating Hollywood goldmine – the superhero spectacle of its age – to a cautionary tale within the faith-based niche. Perhaps a better remake would have shored up the legacy of Wyler’s film: as it is, a YouTube clip of the chariot scene, currently with over 3m views, may be its most enduring edit.
