Flashback, November 1959: ‘Ben-Hur’ Remake Charges to Front of Nation’s Box Offices

Sixty-five years ago this week, struggling MGM bet that the market for cinematic biblical epics was not yet exhausted. The game paid off handsomely when the release of Ben-Hur—the sound adaptation of the best-selling novel of the 19^th century—reaped box-office gold, saving the studio from bankruptcy.

In looking through my past blog posts, I was surprised to discover that, though I had written about much connected to this property—General Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, a director whose one-reel 1907 short triggered a landmark copyright decision, and a 1925 budget-busting silent epic—I’d never written about the version that thousands have seen, in theaters and on television, for the past three generations.

This post, then, is my attempt to rectify this situation and to give this movie all the honor it deserves.

The 1959 remake became one of the most honored films in Hollywood history, netting Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), and Best Actor (Charlton Heston). The 11 it netted in all set a record for the time that has only been equaled since then by Titanic in 1997 and The Return of the King in 2003.

It is also among the most influential movies in screen history. Most recently, Francis Ford Coppola listed it among the 20 films that inspired the epic he released a few months ago, Megalopolis.

Yet another director-producer’s debt to the film is more obvious. The first installment in “Star Wars” saga, The Phantom Menace, features a pod race that is a homage to the archetypal chariot race of Ben-Hur.

Even more so, the first trilogy in George Lucas’ bestselling series, focusing on Anakin Skywalker, bears strong similarities to Lew Wallace’s hero: another slave who makes a splash by competing in a great race, but never really feels entirely at home in the society that now embraces him, and is consumed by revenge for much of the action.

Ben-Hur also left its mark on the evolution of the film epic itself. Without ever stinting on pyrotechnics (it became the first film shot with Panavision lenses to win the Best Cinematography Oscar), it veered sharply from the sword-and-sandals movies associated with Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments), Howard Hawks (Land of the Pharoahs), and King Vidor (Solomon and Sheba).

Wyler delegated direction of the chariot race sequence to Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, while concentrating with his usual perfectionism on the actors’ performances. His creation of a more intimate, character-driven epic would release later releases such as Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Young Winston, Reds, and, only a year later, Spartacus.

(In fact, Kirk Douglas only pursued the latter property when he lost out in the competition to play Ben-Hur to Heston, being offered instead the consolation prize of the titular hero’s friend-turned-enemy, Messala—a role that he considered nothing more than a second-rate villain.)

This desire to focus on characters rather than spectacle has led some viewers to regard the hour-and-a-half remaining after the chariot race to be anticlimactic. But this misunderstands the nature of the property.

The movie took its cue from the subtitle of the Wallace novel, “A Tale of the Christ,” tracking the miracle following Christ’s crucifixion that eventually frees Judah of the bitterness that has spurred his quest even as it deformed his life.

In their quest for character development, Wyler and producer Sam Zimbalist (who died of a heart attack in Rome just as the movie neared completion) employed six different screenwriters: Karl Tunberg, Gore Vidal, Christopher Fry, S. N. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, and Ben Hecht.

Decades after the film’s release, Vidal caused a stir with his suggestion of a gay subtext in the Judah-Messala relationship. Audiences at the time were less likely to notice such elements than today, and in any case both Wyler and Heston denied them when asked about it in later years.

More likely, contemporary audiences would have responded to the Cold War resonance of the plot.

Judah’s refusal to renounce his Jewish heritage and pursue Roman glory with Messala triggers his family’s fall from wealth and influence, not unlike how rejection of informing consigned a host of Hollywood talent to blacklisting in the McCarthy Era.

At the same time, the presence of Rome as an authoritarian power imposing its will on a restless foreign people would have reminded many of the similar role played by the Soviet Union.