Pomp and Circumstance.

Rating: 7/10 (25 April 2015)

It's a long film about Judah Ben-Hur and his family, betrayed by their former Roman friend, Messala. Heston is Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd is Messala. Their mutual enmity animates most of the picture. A combination of luck and skill raises Heston from slavery to the higher echelons of Roman governance, an opportunity he spurns because he has grown to hate Roman civilization. Christ has a featured bit part, whose voice, as Heston says at the end, "has taken the sword from my hand."
This is an epic movie by any definition. No expense must have been spared. And the chariot race in the Circus Maximus is without peer. Heston seems to fit into togas and caftans well. He's an impressive presence on the screen. Stephen Boyd as the unregenerate villain doesn't have as much to do but his death scene probably represents his best moments on the screen. He puts everything he has into it and it comes out right. Hugh Griffith is the wily Arab sheik and, as usual, there's always something slightly comic in his pop-eyed performances.
The director was William Wyler, a competent professional who brought some surprising sense of cynicism and outrage to Jimmy Stewart's post-war Westerns. Here, he catches small details of life under the Romans that are usually ignored in the sword-and-sandal epics of the 1950s, the ones with title like "Hercules Versus the Gorgon." I'd never known before that the slaves manning the oars of the Roman triremes had to be trained to row at three speeds -- regular, battle, attack, and ramming. Whew. Heston and the rest of the rowers are palpably exhausted after a spell of ramming speed.
And before the chariot race, we see footmen or whatever they are, disentangling the gathering horses from one another and dislodging chariot wheels that have gotten themselves stuck in some mural nook. When a charioteer has an accident during the race, they run out rescue him and carry him off on stretchers before the vehicles appear around the bend again. Nice perceptive touches but done conventionally and without distinction. There is a longish scene in the sheik's test, when Griffith fondles his horses and Cheston forces himself to burp. It's an interesting scene, but in "Lawrence of Arabia," there was a similar scene in a vast Arab tent and David Lean had the actors pause while a strong breeze made the tent poles creak slightly. Here, the tent isn't alive. It's just a dead tent.
In the end, no Jews are actually converted to Christianity, which didn't exist yet anyway. But all the principals speak with hushed awe about Christ's sermon the mount. I kept wondering if the Haifa-born Haya Harareet had any difficulty with the role.
As it develops, the thrilling chariot race is ante-climactic. Long after it's over and Messala's death is forgotten, we have to endure Christ's suffering and crucifixion. Of course, he was the original charismatic personality, yet it's always a downer to see someone tortured and killed.
With just a few tweaks, it might have been changed to one of those anti-Nazi movies of the 40s and 50s. The Romans are racists, persecuting the Jews and other misfits, ridiculing the Arabs, torturing prisoners, consigning the sick to the valley of lepers, shown as a kind of concentration camp. Jack Hawkins is magnificent as the Good German.
It's an important movie if only because of its sprawling narrative, it's quotidian details, and that unforgettable chariot race. A viewer can only imagine how today's CGI experts would dump the stunt men like "Breezy" Easton and fill the screen with dismembered bodies, flying arms and legs, and chariots tumbling directly into the camera. In 1959, there were no such techniques available -- a near miss. But I suppose it's only a matter of time before a new version of this chestnut is released.