Ben-Hur (1959)
directed by
screenplay by
I grew up watching this almost every year, just like The Ten Commandments and King Kong. Like with those movies, I was swept up by the epic scope, the exoticisms, and the fantastic elements in Ben-Hur. Rewatching last night, for the first time in some years, I find I'm still transfixed by it. Sure, Hugh Griffiths' brown-face makeup is a little distracting, a lot of the dialogue is stilted, and except for Judah Ben-Hur the characters are thin, but I don't care. It's a surprisingly devout and reverential Hollywood Biblical epic. I definitely missed that as a kid. Of course, what is most attention-grabbing and best remembered are the galley battle and the chariot race. The latter was filmed in a full-sized hippodrome built in a quarry and the race was run essentially for real in front of an audience of 7,000. Clearly the source of the pod race in the terrible Phantom Menace, there's simply no comparison between Lucas' CGI monstrosity and real horses and people. I'm also a fan of Charlton Heston. He could be wooden, but when he's on target, like much of the time here, he's great at doing smoldering anger. He's also a great physical actor, which he gets to prove numerous times here. Stephen Boyd as the villain, Massala, is fine, and Hugh Griffith as Sheik Ilderim is fun.
For Staten Islanders, I picked this up at Bayware Video in Stapleton was when it was shutting down.
Verdict: a keeper
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