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Storyline
Ben-Hur is a 1959 epic film directed by William Wyler, the third film version of Lew Wallace's 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It premiered at Loew's State Theatre in New York City on November 18, 1959. The film went on to win a record of eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, a feat equaled only by Titanic in 1998 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2004. It was also the last film to win the Oscar for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, until nearly 44 years later when Mystic River achieved the same feat.The movie revolves around a Jewish prince who is betrayed and sent into slavery by a Roman friend and how he regains his freedom and comes back for revenge. |
Backdrops
The Director
 William Wyler
William Wyler (July 1, 1902 – July 27, 1981) was a leading American motion picture director, producer, and screenwriter.
Notable works included Ben-Hur (1959), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Mrs. Miniver (1942), all of which won Wyler Academy Awards for Best Director, and also won Best Picture. He earned his first Oscar nomination for directing Dodsworth in 1936, starring Walter Huston and Mary Astor, "sparking a 20-year run of almost unbroken greatness."
Film historian Ian Freer calls Wyler a "bona fide perfectionist," whose penchant for retakes and an attempt to hone every last nuance, "became the stuff of legend." His ability to direct a string of classic literary adaptations into huge box-office and critical successes made him one of "Hollywood's most bankable moviemakers" during the 1930s and 1940s.
Other popular films include Funny Girl (196 8), How to Steal a Million (1966), The Big Country (1958), Roman Holiday (1953), The Heiress (1949), The Letter (1940), The Westerner (1940), Wuthering Heights (1939), Jezebel (1938), Dodsworth (1936), A House Divided (1931), and Hell's Heroes (1930).
Description above from the Wikipedia article William Wyler, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
User Reviews
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Viewing Ben-Hur for the AFI Project
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From November 29, 2009:
What's the AFI project, you ask? For more information, or if you just enjoy my bemused ramblings, read here:http://www.spout.com/blogs/pippin06/archive/2008/3/1/25756.aspx
Ben-Hur is on the following AFI lists:
The Original Top 100 (#72)
100 Most Heart-Pounding Movies (#49)
25 Film Scores (#21)
100 Most Inspiring Movies (#56)
The Revised Top 100 (#100)
10 Top 10's (#2 Epic)
Ben-Hur was Instantly viewed on Netflix, but oh how I avoided this film like the seventh plague until this project. For various reasons, I have always been turned off by these biblical epics; I mean, I suppose they're somewhat more interesting than a visit to church, but they are, as a rule, long, overblown, and, statistically speaking, feature Charlton Heston, of whom I am not much of a fan. This is one of the films on the list that I only agreed to watch because it was on the list, like The Birth of a Nation. Unexpectedly, I did sort of like the movie; it was better than I thought it was going to be. Still, it was a bit long and overblown. I'll get to that in a minute.
Good old Chuck plays Judah Ben-Hur, a prince among the Jews in Judea, which has recently been conquered by the Roman Empire. The subtitle of this film is "A Tale of the Christ;" which exists because Ben-Hur's struggles are contemporaneous to (and in some ways mirror) the life and death of Jesus Christ. Judah is visited by his childhood friend, a Roman named Messala (Stephen Boyd), who has recently been appointed tribune. His childhood idealism has morphed into naked ambition, and he wants Judah to help convince the Jews that the Romans are really copacetic guys who are there to keep p...
View full review
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reviewed by Pippin2010 (Filmaster.com) on the 17th of March 2010
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Niblo's version makes Wyler's pale in comparison in just about every way. This one is all Hollywoodized. About 50% longer, it adds a bunch of silly crap in an attempt to amp up the sympathy for Judah, his steamy passion for Esther, or the dramatic tension. The sea battle in this one is a joke compared to what had been done 40 years earlier. I would say that even the chariot race is not a significant improvement. As for Heston, his intense brooding gets tiresome.