The most prestigious of prestigious epics

Rating: 7/10 (6 April 2006)

William Wyler is probably the greatest Hollywood director ever to have fallen out of fashion. Winner of three Oscars as Best Director he made some of the most prestigious studio films of the thirties, forties and fifties but they are now largely ignored in favour of smaller, grittier movies from the likes of Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller and other of the 'B Diectors'. But a look back at the best of Wyler's work, ("Dodsworth", "The Letter", "The Heiress", "Carrie", "Friendly Persuasion"), should ensure his place in the canon of great directors.
"Ben-Hur" isn't in the league of any of the above but at the time of its release it was seen as the most prestigious of prestigious studio pictures, an epic as significant for its day as "Gone with the Wind" and like "Gone with the Wind" it chalked up a record number of Oscars, (it won every Oscar for which it was nominated with the exception of Best Screenplay). It was conceived and executed on a scale unimaginable today and it goes on forever, (well, for close on four hours anyway), but then it has everything; sea battles, leprosy, Christ, (and the Crucifixion), and a chariot race that remains unequaled of its kind, certainly in the annals of action cinema, (though the direction of this great sequence is credited now, not to Wyler, but largely to the second-unit director and former stunt-man Yakima Canutt).
In the title role Charlton Heston stuck out his noble jaw once too often. His idea of acting is to crunch up his face and bare his teeth. He's like a horse in the process of being broken. Stephen Boyd's black-hearted Messala is by far the more interesting character, (nobility is such a bore), and Boyd plays him superbly emphasizing the homo-erotic bond between the two men, something evident to everyone except apparently to Heston who was oblivious as to Messala's interest in him, (about the only thing in the script, on which many writers worked, in which Gore Vidal's influence might be found). The other great performance is by the Welsh character actor Hugh Griffith as Sheik Ibderim. He isn't in the film long enough but he steals every scene he's in. You can see a real actor's love of acting in his wily old face and he was awarded the Oscar.
Of course, there is nothing Wyler, or probably anyone else, could do about the banal religiosity, the miracles and the platitudes though he could have censured Miklos Rozsa's Godawful score which accompanies them. Seeing the film now it is obvious Wyler was not the man for the job. His best films are interior pictures, character studies where the dramas are played out in enclosed spaces. Even in "The Big Country" it is not the vastness of the plains we remember but the dark, interior secrets of the people who inhabit them. Of course to say that "Ben-Hur" could just as easily have been directed by any superior craftsman is, perhaps, to do it and Wyler an injustice. It's a more tightly controlled epic than most, made up of a series of short scenes that carry the story along. This is what signifies it as a Wyler picture. It may be far from his best work but it certainly is no disgrace.