A remarkably strong film

Rating: 8/10 (30 April 2000)

One thing that always bothers me about the Oscars ceremony, now about to enter its 71st year, is the necessity for each award on a yearly basis. Take the award for Best Male Actor. What if there were no good actors in a particular year? Should not the Academy say "we'll drop this single award for the year, as no actor met the high standard we require?" Similarly, the need for a "Best Picture" on a yearly basis is something that seriously undermines the credibility of the awards. Okay, Citizen Kane and The Shawshank Redemption were overlooked, but what really detracts is the ones that make it. Is the honour of winning "Best Picture" really as great when you know that means entering the same league of distinction as Titanic and Forrest Gump?
And so we come to Ben-Hur, which, before Titanic's equalling pull on the golden statuettes, was the largest recipient of the Oscars. This is something that is oft touted, and of course the main draw to watch the thing. Yet has anyone ever bothered to ask what competition it had? Just as Forrest Gump only had the unsuitable-through-excessive-violence Pulp Fiction to oppose it, 1959 was not a highpoint of cinematic achievement. Revered fare like North By Northwest, Some Like It Hot and The 39 Steps were released, but would ultimately have been too mainstream for the awards at that time. Critically popular foreign films such as Hiroshima Mon Amour and Apur Sansar were also led to the cinemas, but when has a foreign movie picked up "Best Picture"? Room at the Top and The Diary of Anne Frank numbered amongst the token nominations, and so it was that Ben-Hur couldn't do anything BUT pick up 11 of the 29 awards going. (And it was only eligible for 15. Notable losses included no nominations for female cast members, who had little to do anyway, and a nomination but not a win for the writing).
It's just as well, then, that this 212 long minutes of MGM pomp and splendour deserved the awards laid at it's feet (Though I might contest the treacly sentimental music as not worthy of the "Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture" Award). A visual feast, if not always an intellectual one, it's epic grandiosity is always present, whether it's in lesser-known scenes like the underground leper colony, or the most famous, the chariot race. For a film that's now over 40 years old, it has aged remarkably well, and if you can spot the odd matte effect in the depiction of coliseums, or the battles at sea, then they have aged far better than early 90s CGI. In fact, probably the only fault you could really level at the film is it's sentimentality which, while not awash with it, does overcome the final reels. Its old-fashioned rigid virtues do tend to drag, but it is, in the main, a constantly pleasing production with minimal ostentation. Take the scene where Hur first meets the horses he is to use in the chariot race. It's a standard scene and far from vital in terms of the narrative, but the fact that the four horses in question enter a tent and interact with the cast is a small delight in the film. A quartet of actor horses who come into a human domain without wrecking the place, and yawn and nod on queue. Yet, delightful as it is, it is stopped before it becomes trite or the training of the animals is overly apparent.
Interestingly, it's the characters off-screen that dictate the action. Hur's childhood friend, Messala (Stephen Boyd) is absent for over an hour of the middle section, yet is it Hur's hatred of what he has become that drives him, the desire for revenge against Messala that keep him alive. So too, the story follows the life of Jesus (the film's subtitle is "A Tale of The Christ"), as seen through Ben-Hur's perspective. We never get to see Jesus' face or hear him speak, a factor that adds to his mystique.

While the off-screen presences drive the narrative, the main characters fare perhaps less well. Heston is a strong lead as Hur, though the women are practically non-existent. Instead, what really forms the core of this movie is not the actors or parts, but the sheer spectacle. Films like this were made for the visual medium of cinema, with huge mock-ups of Jerusalem and Rome (cruelly destroyed by MGM after use so no Italian filmmakers could take advantage of them) and hundreds of extras. It's all in the sights, and on this perception alone it shames any latter-day action film for sheer excess. Not the most remarkable of the "classic" films, it must be said, but still an unmissable experience.