Ben-Hur (1959)

I read Lew Wallace's novel (subtitled "A Tale of the Christ") a year and a half ago, finding it to be way too verbose and also a little heavy on vengeance themes for an ostensibly Christian story that had been blessed by the Pope. The Charlton Heston movie version fixed one of these two major issues. That issue was not the length. Clocking in at nearly four hours, the film wasted no time to... waste tons of time. The opening credits weren't finished until about 17 minutes into the movie. There was a lengthy intermission where I even had to change the discs. In many respects, this was just Lawrence of Arabia all over again. But to this movie's credit, at least I could hear all of the dialogue. The movie's most famous scene is that of a chariot race, and while I loved its intensity and technical prowess, I did find myself wondering why it took nine minutes to depict, but I guess in a nearly four-hour movie, what's nine minutes? A lot of scenes in this film were really impressive, don't get me wrong, but I just don't think it needed to be nearly as long as it was. I blame excessive stage-acting and single-setting dialogue scenes just as I did with Lawrence of Arabia. The thing the movie did right that the book utterly failed to do was to actually contain a Christian sentiment or two; Charlton Heston's Judah Ben-Hur is inspired by Christ to forget about his quest for vengeance on an old rival. Lew Wallace's Judah Ben-Hur simply never took away that concept of forgiveness, one of the central tenets of Christianity itself. So while the book was lengthy, a bit boring, and thematically confused, the movie was merely lengthy and a bit boring. And so now I find myself done with the Golden Age of cinema in my backlog; the earliest movie remaining there is 1987's Evil Dead 2.