But if you remember Ben-Hur fondly, chances are you’re selectively forgetting some drab, extended passages – that interminable visit to the leper colony, or any of the wooden, chemistry-free romantic dithering between Heston’s Judah and Haya Harareet’s Esther – or the excruciating (yet Oscar-winning) brownface hammery of Hugh Griffith’s Sheik Ilderim. Charlton Heston’s neck veins glistening and threatening to pop at scattered points throughout the narrative, maybe. It only fills nine minutes of the film’s 212, after all: they’re nine thoroughly transfixing minutes, to be fair, a testament to the increasingly rare, tactile thrill of spectacular Hollywood action realised entirely through physical means.īut what else do you remember from the film’s remaining three-plus hours? The arduous rowing in the galleys, most likely. Everyone knows the chariot race sequence, of course, though I’d guess rather fewer people have actually seen it in context. Shorn of event status, is Ben-Hur a classic, or is it simply a title people know, a signifier of a particular brand of epic cinema? One has to wonder how often the saga of Judah Ben-Hur – from Jewish prince to condemned slave to anguished witness to Christ’s crucifixion – is actually watched today, in all its sprawling, lumbering glory. They just weren’t events, the kind of films promoted as experiences above all – something that almost any blockbuster only gets to be once, for a year at most, in its long, brawny life. Those, of course, were better films then and better films now, even if they raked in a fraction of Ben-Hur’s supersized total. Yet there was an oddly, inadvertently back-handed undertone to that grandstanding: Ben-Hur may have been the entertainment experience of one lifetime, yes, but has it endured through subsequent ones? The biblical spectacular celebrates its 60th anniversary this month, yet it doesn’t feel as broadly celebrated today as other films marking the same milestone: Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, for example, or Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, or Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.

Ben hur wallace