GROSS/50 1959 Ben-Hur - I can only apologise
Stupid, cruel, stupidly cruel.
BEN-HUR, director WILLIAM WYLER, screenplay KARL TUNBERG, cast CHARLTON HESTON, JACK HAWKINS, HAYA HARAREET, STEPHEN BOYD, production METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER, 1958, 212 MINUTES.
I should have known, when I started this journey through the history of Hollywood. I obviously should have anticipated that we’d get to this period, roughly in the middle, when the adventurous, heterodox humanism of the first half would fall away and be replaced by something leaden, reactionary, war-like. But anyway, it has happened. We’ll be done soon, though. Hold on.
I don’t want to dwell here, in Roman Judea, for too long. I really don’t. It’s grim. But do I have any right to ask more from these terrible mid-century epics? These vast, humourless pantechnicons of righteousness? I don’t suppose I do. I mean the category was the biggest by far for almost twenty years. People loved these things. This one became the archetype, standing for the whole genre. A playground joke even in my childhood.
And Charlton Heston became the genre’s primary weapon. He didn’t only make epics but after about 1950 pretty much everything he did was one. Not typecasting so much as contagion. Everything he touched became an epic. Whatever it was, as Heston arrived on the lot and walked over to the set, the movie bulked up and gained status (the apes film started as a quirky drama about talking monkeys but then Heston came on board and - boom - an epic).
The story of Ben-Hur starts in 26AD, so we’ve immediately got our bearings. Rome is close to its imperial peak and it’s an absolute monarchy, exercising absolute dominance across its whole extent - including the small province of Judea. More to the point, Jesus is abroad and approaching his own melancholy peak.
The Roman regime is harsh, military in character and polices dissent with cruelty. The prisons and the galleys are full, crucifixions on the regular. The jews of Judea are under the heel of Rome. Dissidents and freedom fighters are disappeared and forgotten.
From the beginning the only dialogue that’s possible with this regime is a harsh, one-sided ‘get used to it, losers’. Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), the wealthiest man in Judea, a prince and sufficiently elite to have played with the province’s new military commander Messala (Stephen Boyd) when they both were children, is pushed into opposition to the regime when his old friend dials up the brutality and begins to imprison dissidents.
Messala tells Ben-Hur “Be wise, Judah. It’s a Roman world, if you want to live in it you must become part of it…” There’s a lot of this - essentially realist geopolitics: “Persuade your people that their resistance to Rome is stupid. Worse than stupid - futile - for it can end in only one way - extinction for your people!”
Ben-Hur’s contribution is broadly romantic-nationalist: “You may conquer the land, you may slaughter the people, but it is not the end. We will rise again.” “Rome is an affront to God. Rome is strangling my people, my country, the whole earth! I tell you, the day Rome falls there will be a shout of freedom such as the world has never heard before!”
To state the obvious, in the 1950s, there were two immediate models for this kind of domination narrative. The Nazi one - the ugliest possible combination of territorial ambition with the irrational racial animus that produced the holocaust - and the communist one. Hollywood, of course, always refuses the first model, even when the narrative is a biblical one and the suffering people Jewish. The only available analogy in the Eisenhower period is with the Soviet system. Imperial overreach, collectivising tyranny etc. Caesar is Khrushchev and that’s it.
The scene is set. Not only for Judah Ben-Hur (but especially for Judah Ben-Hur) this will be a cruel and oppressive period. Rome will not yield. But to be honest I’m struggling to arrive at an analysis here. It’s exhausting. Ben-Hur is an unrelievedly dark movie. It’s like a classical tragedy in which the hero must be destroyed… and then destroyed again. And then again. Suffering upon suffering will be heaped upon Judah.
Relief will come but at vast cost. And the redemption offered will be of the diminished form you get from big, stupid Hollywood in this period. A studio redemption, won on an enormous set built alongside Cinecittà’s already spectacular ancient Rome. A dizzying redemption that seems to assert the triumph of the American way with more confidence than, say, peace or love.
Ben-Hur is the centrepiece of the sequence of movies that makes up Hollywood’s response to the post-war religious revival in the USA, when church-going reached its peak and the evangelicals began to build their base for later dominance. The Judeo-Christian God dominated this period in the same way that, er, Tony Stark dominates ours. The long sequence of religious epics was the superhero franchise of its day. Enormous, lazy, reductive slabs that ultimately became mechanical, involuted and repetitive. Collapsing like the Roman Empire.
And, as I keep saying, I’m bored. I’m weary of these monstrosities. They constitute a huge, unproductive void in the middle of the history, a tear in the continuum, an illustration of how stupid and venal a vast movie culture can be. And, oh God, the next one up is Spartacus. I think I might get an AI to review it. Or a dog.
Ben-Hur is on Amazon Prime and practically everywhere else. There are very good value multi-region Blu-Rays. The 1925 version is on YouTube too.
More about the religious revival in my review of another Heston epic - the one about the circus.
Every cinematic epic is a vast enterprise. If you add the enormous economic catastrophe of the first version, made by the same studio in 1925, this is a project on the scale of a small country or a huge corporation. A transnational effort, employing thousands and leaving a substantial material trace, on two continents. Hollywood has insisted, from the very beginning, on being the biggest enterprise, the grandest human undertaking. What would world culture and the world economy look like without it?
Fredric Jameson said that the dominant narrative forms would reveal something about the ‘political unconscious’ of a society. I’m not clever enough to develop this idea here but, presumably, the form of the biblical epic - so distinctive and so anachronistic - must tell us a great deal about the fantasies and fears of a country experiencing, in the post-war decades, both accelerating world dominance and the terror of instantaneous annihilation at the same time.
Plenty of Nazis in the movies of this period, of course, but in war stories, where they are allowed their cruelty but only in a military context.
Men were forced to row battleships, like the one to which Ben-Hur is chained, for thousands of years - and well into the eighteenth century. More about this in the essay about 1924’s top-grossing movie The Sea Hawk.
Heston was a civil rights campaigner. There are amazing photographs from the march on Washington. Later he became a gun rights activist. A rational reading finds a consistency here, though. He was essentially an honest republican.
This review and others are on Letterboxd.