Ben-Hur

Ben-Hur (1959) is about a Jewish prince in Jerusalem enslaved and seeking revenge; it won eleven Oscars. Judah Ben-Hur meets his childhood friend Messala, now a Roman officer. An accident is turned into a political crime, Judah is sent to the galleys and his mother and sister are thrown into prison. Years later he comes back. At the centre is the chariot race. It runs about nine minutes, took months to prepare, required an enormous arena and thousands of extras. Nothing in it is digital. A story has circulated about that sequence for decades: that a stuntman died during the race and the footage is in the film. It is not true. The second unit director Yakima Canutt stated that every figure run over was a weighted dummy. The only injury was to Joe Canutt, doubling for Charlton Heston, who was thrown from his chariot; he was wearing protective padding and came away with a small cut on his chin. That fall is in the film and was far less serious than it looks. The source of the story is probably confusion: during the silent Ben-Hur of 1926 a wheel broke in the chariot race and a stuntman really did die. The two films have been conflated. William Wyler directed, having been one of the assistant directors on the 1926 film. Miklós Rózsa's score became the measure for the genre. It runs 212 minutes, with an interval. Good for: epic cinema, classic Hollywood, and film history. Less good for: it is very long, the first section is slow, and the religious frame is dominant.