Ben-Hur
All team (25)
Short description
In Roman-occupied Judea, the noble Judah Ben-Hur is reunited with Messala, a childhood friend who has returned to Jerusalem as a Roman commander. Their bond breaks when Judah refuses to betray his own people, and a mishap during a Roman procession gives Messala the pretext to strike: Judah is sent to the galleys, while his mother and sister are imprisoned. What follows is Judah's long road back, through slavery and the households of Rome, toward a reckoning with the friend who destroyed his life. Based on Lew Wallace's novel, it is a story of betrayal, endurance and vengeance.
William Wyler directed this eighteenth of his twenty-two films, made between The Big Country and The Children's Hour. Charlton Heston plays Judah, with Stephen Boyd as Messala, Jack Hawkins as Quintus Arrius, Hugh Griffith as Scheich Ildirim, Haya Harareet as Esther and Martha Scott as Miriam; Karl Tunberg wrote the screenplay and Sam Zimbalist produced. The scale is evident in a budget of 15 million dollars and a worldwide gross of 164 million.
Audience ratings are high on both platforms, 8.1/10 on IMDb across roughly 270,000 votes and 7.9/10 on TMDB from a much smaller sample, while the critics' rating of 8.4/10 from 58 reviews places it above both. With a 212-minute runtime and 69 credited cast members, it remains one of the largest American productions of its era.
What's left behind the scenes
- To transform the brownish water reservoir into a real Mediterranean Sea, they had to call a chemist. He poured in some substance – the water turned azure. However, anyone who fell overboard during the battle couldn't wash off the residue for a long time.
- For filming the battle scenes, MGM wanted to use an exact replica of a Roman ship. The built boat lasted only a few minutes on the ocean surface. The very first small wave capsized it. So, they had to move the "ancient" vessel to a special pool and control it with ropes.
- Burt Lancaster turned down the lead role in the film.
- To support the extras, MGM built special pavilions where 5,000 extras could easily have lunch in 20 minutes.
- 50,000 people (residents of several Italian villages) participated in the extras casting, with 15,000 of them alone in the chariot races.
- Italian women sent the filmmakers over 160 kilograms of hair for making wigs and false beards.
- This film was intended to save MGM studio from bankruptcy. And it did – with a budget of $15 million, it grossed $70 million worldwide.
- The film contains no complete stories taken from the Bible. It has two scenes that correspond to some facts outlined in the New Testament.
- The film was not shown in the USSR due to its plot being tied to events from the New Testament and was first shown in Russian only in 1994 on the NTV television channel.
- The film is based on the novel of the same name by American writer Lew Wallace.
- Actors from eight countries were invited for the filming, with preference given to European aristocrats.
- After filming, all the sets were destroyed.
- The filmmakers tried to understand what the Jerusalem stadium once looked like. The first archaeologist replied – like a Roman one, the second – like a Phoenician one, and the third was surprised that a stadium existed in Jerusalem at all. They decided to make it look the same as in the 1926 film "Ben-Hur".
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