Ben-Hur: Not a movie, but an event

“Ben-Hur” has not aged well, but watching it still feels like an event. It works because it shamelessly, un-cynically embraces its bigness.

Well scratch “Ben-Hur” from the list of super long movies I’ll eventually get around to seeing. I finally watched all 222 minutes of it. That just leaves “Intolerance,” “My Fair Lady” and “Giant” as 3-hour plus AFI 100 titles that will be buried in my Netflix queue for another few months or years.

But the reason you really have to watch “Ben-Hur” is because even today, watching it feels like an event. I rented it from the library on Blu-Ray because I decided, “This was the weekend I’m finally going to do it!” I was going to sit and listen to the six and a half minute Overture of unabashedly gigantic swells in Miklos Rosa’s score and just be wowed by something. I don’t think I felt that way when I popped “Persona” in the DVD player last week.

Here is a movie that shamelessly, un-cynically embraces its spirituality and its bigness. It lacks the nuance and adventure contained within something like “Lawrence of Arabia,” but in its straight-forward approach it attains that feeling of epic grandeur at every moment.

Director William Wyler ultimately agreed to do the project because he wanted to “Out DeMille Cecil B. DeMille.” “The Ten Commandments,” which also starred Charlton Heston, was a big success a few years earlier, but “Ben-Hur” was significant because it was the movie that would ultimately save MGM from bankruptcy (or at least until quite recently). The movie was the fastest money-maker of all time and was second only to “Gone With the Wind” at the box office. Continue reading “Ben-Hur: Not a movie, but an event”