Cinema: New Picture, Nov. 30, 1959

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Out of this sea of celluloid, a masterful director, William (Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives') Wyler, has fished a whale of a picture, the biggest and the best of Hollywood's super-spectacles. The story of Ben-Hur is reasonably faithful to the general's stirring "Tale of the Christ." Prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a rich Jew born about the same time as Christ, falls out with his childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd), commander of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, who demands that Ben-Hur inform against other Jewish patriots. When Ben-Hur refuses, Messala condemns him to certain death as a galley slave and shuts up his mother (Martha Scott) and sister (Cathy O'Donnell) in a pestilential dungeon. Ben-Hur is freed from the galley, taken to Rome and adopted by a Roman admiral (Jack Hawkins) whose life he has saved. As soon as possible, he goes back to Palestine, hears that his mother and sister are dead, enters against Messala in the chariot races and rides him into the ground. But Messala has his vengeance. With his dying breath he tells Ben-Hur that his mother and sister are alive, but are lepers. Heartbroken and crazed with hate, the hero sets out to raise a rebellion against Rome, but he is caught up in the procession to Calvary, and becomes a Christian. The picture ends with Christ's death and the hero's rebirth.

The film has its failures. The movie hero is pretty much an overgrown boy scout who never experiences the moral struggles that beset the hero of the book. Then, too, the story sometimes lags—not, oddly enough, because it is too long but because it is too short. For the final script, M-G-M eliminated an entire subplot that gives the middle of the story its shape and suspense. But the religious theme is handled with rare restraint and good taste. The face of Christ is never fully revealed. The Sermon on the Mount, The Trial. The Ascent of Calvary and The Crucifixion are pictured, without breathless reverence, in a matter-of-fact manner, as contemporary political events.

The script, written by Karl Tunberg, and touched up by S. N. Behrman, Gore Vidal and Christopher Fry, is well ordered, and its lines sometimes sing with good rhetoric and quiet poetry. The actors, for the most part, play in the grand manner, but with controlled firmness. Actor Boyd carries off the prize with a virile portrayal of Messala, and Hugh

Griffith provides some skillful comic relief as a sheik who is crazy over horses. But what matters most and comes off best in the picture is the great scenes of spectacle, particularly the chariot race, a superbly handled crescendo of violence that ranks as one of the finest action sequences ever shot. All by itself it would be worth the price of admission.

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