Grand if allowed to be grand

Rating: 10/10 (19 August 1999)

I second the comments of the fellow who said that `Ben-Hur' must be seen on a big, wide screen. Note (for instance) a particular shot in that scene near the end, where we see Miriam surrounded by darkness, staring in fear out at nothing in particular. Wyler places her illuminated face at the furthermost left of the screen, with nothing but black to the right: it's very effective, especially after three hours of detailed panorama. On TV this is just another dull close-up. By a hundred subtle transformations of this kind is Wyler's breathtaking work turned into stodge.
This is particularly fatal because Ben-Hur had some tendency towards stodge to begin with. The portentous reminders of the divinity of Christ (`He says - he says he IS doing his father's work') are far too many and all of them stage-bound - and what do they REALLY have to do with the story of Ben-Hur, anyway? Even without the Christianity, Wyler leads us through each scene rather as if the story were some kind of museum exhibit.
Only on the big screen does it emerge that this latter feature is a virtue rather than a vice. After all - at least it's a museum exhibit we're allowed time to contemplate. Had the film been made today we would have been hustled through in half the time, a long queue of impatient patrons behind us, none of us getting a good look at anything and all of us feeling short-changed. You have to be prepared to wallow in order to properly appreciate `Ben-Hur'; but if you ARE prepared to wallow, there IS something worth wallowing in.