This should probably be considered a must-see film from the silent era, as lavish and impressive as it is. The scenes with the trireme battle at sea and the chariot race are incredibly realistic and highly entertaining, and I don't mean that as "for a silent film from 1925", I mean that period. There are so many extras involved - including, apparently, a great many Hollywood stars before they were stars - that in some scenes we feel the grand scale of the moment brought to life. The story of the Jewish prince (Ramon Novarro) cast into slavery by his childhood friend, a Roman (Francis X. Bushman) has real emotional weight behind it, and the scenes of his mother and sister rotting away in a dank dungeon are harrowing. It is a Christian film which shows scenes from Christ's life often preceded by quotes from the Gospels, but to its credit, it gets the fundamental message of peace and nonviolence right.
Novarro makes for a reasonably good Ben-Hur, particularly while rowing in the slave ship resentfully, and in the scenes opposite a young woman he's interested in (May McAvoy). Carmel Myers plays the Egyptian lover of his nemesis, sent to seduce him into giving her some information, and sizzles in the scenes she's in. The rest of the performances are all reasonably good, but this is less a film about performances, and more about its epic scale and those dramatic scenes. The chariot race involved a tremendous amount of editing and is so clearly influential, starting with the film's own remake 34 years later. Indeed, a young 23-year-old assistant director (William Wyler) would go on to make the better-known 1959 version of the film. While I was very impressed by it, my only criticism is that it's very clear that animals were harmed during the filming, and I read later that five horses (and a stuntman) died.
The film is an interesting mix of pagan and Christian themes, and that undoubtedly helped it get away with a few things. I was a little surprised to see three instances of nudity: a woman has her top ripped off as she's shoved to the ground, one of the prisoners on the galley stands naked and with his back to the camera, and there are a couple of rows of topless young women throwing flowers in the air when Ben Hur is getting a parade.
It's 143 minutes long but pretty well paced, though the first and last 20 minutes or so were slower, maybe because they were more focused on the Christian aspects. I must confess, these brought the film down a bit for me, and I liked the pagan parts better. It was interesting that Jesus is afforded the same treatment that another prophet who would come along about six centuries later would receive: he's never seen. We see his hand gently waving over people, creating miracles and invoking peace, but never his face. Some of the scenes showing moments from his life work well, including his birth, which has the wise men trekking across the dessert with meteors in the night sky, and then the manger scene bursting forth in primitive 2-strip technicolor and a suitably angelic Mary (Betty Bronson). Others are less successful, including the last supper and crucifixion, which look cheap and staged, a shame because so much money was used on other scenes. I liked the message of peace, consistent with scripture but so often not followed, but the religious scenes didn't resonate with me, reeking too much of the mythology which surrounds it. Overall though, a true epic.
Novarro makes for a reasonably good Ben-Hur, particularly while rowing in the slave ship resentfully, and in the scenes opposite a young woman he's interested in (May McAvoy). Carmel Myers plays the Egyptian lover of his nemesis, sent to seduce him into giving her some information, and sizzles in the scenes she's in. The rest of the performances are all reasonably good, but this is less a film about performances, and more about its epic scale and those dramatic scenes. The chariot race involved a tremendous amount of editing and is so clearly influential, starting with the film's own remake 34 years later. Indeed, a young 23-year-old assistant director (William Wyler) would go on to make the better-known 1959 version of the film. While I was very impressed by it, my only criticism is that it's very clear that animals were harmed during the filming, and I read later that five horses (and a stuntman) died.
The film is an interesting mix of pagan and Christian themes, and that undoubtedly helped it get away with a few things. I was a little surprised to see three instances of nudity: a woman has her top ripped off as she's shoved to the ground, one of the prisoners on the galley stands naked and with his back to the camera, and there are a couple of rows of topless young women throwing flowers in the air when Ben Hur is getting a parade.
It's 143 minutes long but pretty well paced, though the first and last 20 minutes or so were slower, maybe because they were more focused on the Christian aspects. I must confess, these brought the film down a bit for me, and I liked the pagan parts better. It was interesting that Jesus is afforded the same treatment that another prophet who would come along about six centuries later would receive: he's never seen. We see his hand gently waving over people, creating miracles and invoking peace, but never his face. Some of the scenes showing moments from his life work well, including his birth, which has the wise men trekking across the dessert with meteors in the night sky, and then the manger scene bursting forth in primitive 2-strip technicolor and a suitably angelic Mary (Betty Bronson). Others are less successful, including the last supper and crucifixion, which look cheap and staged, a shame because so much money was used on other scenes. I liked the message of peace, consistent with scripture but so often not followed, but the religious scenes didn't resonate with me, reeking too much of the mythology which surrounds it. Overall though, a true epic.