Fred Niblo (and, uncredited, Charles Brabin, Christy Cabanne, J. J. Cohn, and Rex Ingram) | Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ / 1925 || William Wyler | Ben-Hur / 1959

believing

by Douglas Messerli

 

June Mathis (screenplay, with a scenario by Carey Wilson and titles by Katherine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell, based on the novel by Lew Wallace) Fred Niblo and, uncredited, Charles Brabin, Christy Cabanne, J. J. Cohn and Rex Ingram (directors) Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ / 1925

Karl Turnberg (screenplay with Gore Vidal, Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, and Christopher Fry, based on the novel by Lew Wallace), William Wyler (director) Ben-Hur / 1959

Fred Niblo’s 1925 version of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and William Wyler’s remake of the epic drama, I would argue, are gay only if you want them to be. And even then you have to make do in the first version with a moment or two of the lovely smile of the pretty gay actor Roman Novarro and the square-jawed friendly gestures of Francis X Bushman chatting about the good old days they played as children together and in the Wyler version be satisfied with the “almost” lustful eyeing of the beautiful Stephen Boyd’s Messala and the enthusiastic grins of the handsome Charlton Heston’s Judah to believe that they are harboring a deep homosexual love for one another that both feel is being denied and dismissed, leading to the bitter spat which propels the rest of the movie.

      What’s more you have to basically trust Gore Vidal who served as one of the many dialogue writers for the 1959 film—far from the most reliable historian of things gay—and my beloved mentor Vito Russo’s recounting of the situation to contextualize what you’re seeing in the 1959 version of the screen. In his book Russo quotes Vidal in a somewhat different and shorter version from what Vidal recounts on screen in the film documentary version of The Celluloid Closet:

      

“I proposed the notion that the two had been adolescent lovers and now Messala has returned from Rome wanting to revive the love affair but Ben-Hur does not. He has read Leviticus and knows an abomination when he sees one. I told Wyler, “This is what’s going on underneath the scene—they seem to be talking politics, but Messala is really ready to rekindle a love affair,” and Wyler was startled. [In the filmed interview Vidal suggests that Wyler reminded him that the film’s subtitle was “A Tale of the Christ.”] We discussed the matter, and then he sighed, “Well. Anything is better than what we’ve got in the way of motivation, but don’t tell Chuck,” [in the recorded version adding, “because he’ll fall apart.”] I did tell Stephen Boyd, who was fascinated. He agreed to play the frustrated lover. Study his face in the reaction shots in that scene, and you will see that he plays it like a man starving [in the film version on Russo’s book, adding that Heston plays the role like Francis X. Bushman.]”

    It’s such a lovely Hollywood legend, and it truly helps to make the film far more interesting, that one is tempted to totally believe it. Except that Wyler apparently remembers no such conversation and had most tossed out Vidal’s script this time, replacing it with the more archaic rendering of Christopher Fry. Heston, predictably, is offended by the very notion. But Morgan Hudgens, publicity director for the film, however, wrote to Vidal in late May 1958 about the crucial scene, and implied there was a homosexual context:  “...the big cornpone [the crew's nickname for Heston] really threw himself into your ‘first meeting' scene yesterday. You should have seen those boys embrace!" And embrace they do, with Boyd looking very much like he’s ready to eat up his old friend.

     Novarro and Bushman on the other hand look at first to be at daggers from the very first moment of their reunion, but part of that may be explained by the fact that Judah greets him openly in public before his fellow Roman friends, embarrassing him perhaps not only because Ben-Hur is a Jew, but as all closeted Romans he might not want to let the others know that he has such a pretty boyfriend. After all, the Romans very well knew what young men might do with one another as boys in bed. It’s a bit like the bully trying to hide is secret past, and, perhaps, may help to explain the cause of his current brutalness.

      The two do open up a bit in Niblo’s film when they move off from others and later meet up at Judah’s home, but even then the love they feel between them as little opportunity to reveal itself before they begin talking politics, where after Messala even warns Judah of speaking like a traitor, the scene ends with the arrests Ben-Hur and his family for attempting to kill the new Roman governor Valerius Gratus, when a tile from their roof falls on the Roman parade.

      In writing this piece I had to watch both films in order to make sure that there wasn’t anything

else that others had missed in the first version and I might have forgotten about in the later. But I had seen 1959 version as a young man with my family at The World theater in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and had since watched with growing disinterest and finally distaste about 5 times since. So I did not at all look forward to the nearly 2 ½ viewing time of the 1925 version. I kept reminding myself as I put off the viewings that both movies had been added into The National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". And several friends and critics had reminded me over my months of postponement that Niblo’s film, the better of the two, was most certainly worth seeing.

     I am happy to report they were quite correct. The 1925 Ben Hur is remarkable in its cinematography, and is truly moving as a film if you skip over almost any and all of the scenes involving the spiritual and the life of Christ. Even the opening scenes with the masses swelling in and out Jerusalem are quite impressive, and the Christmas card retelling the Star of Bethlehem, the rush by the local Shepherds to see the Christ child and the visitation of the Wise Men to the Cave of David where the child lies are rather beautiful, filmed as they are in early two-color Technicolor.

      After the infamous reencounter between Judah and Messala, Ben Hur’s arrest, and his trek through the desert where he briefly meets Christ as a young working with his father Joseph, the silent movie becomes quite remarkable. But even here, in this early scene, Niblo shows himself a master, by refusing to visualize the boy Christ, revealing him only as he works on a piece of wood with a saw and through the hand the scoops water into a gourd that is put to the desperately thirsty Ben-Hur mouth. Looking up to see who has been so kind to ignore the bullying Romans in order to sustain his life, Judah sees no face, as the director focuses his camera once more on the piece of wood and the saw now resuming its motion.

      The scene that follows is one of the most remarkable, outside of the film’s later Chariot Race, in all of silent film history. We are now at sea with the beautiful flotilla of Roman ships. But in the bowels, so an intertitle warns, sits misery as the camera moves below to show us, far more wondrously than Wyler’s later version, shelf after shelf of rowers, the matching hauls filled with layers of most nude men rowing endlessly to the pounding beat. Just such a collation of so man men crowded together, even as unkempt as most of them are, can only invoke an intense homoerotic spell, which strangely and most inexplicably is even heighted by the appearance of a stunning modeled nude body of a man chained up to the wall. What he has done and why he has been treated so differently from the others (we later watch a man who attempts to rise out of his bench being lashed to death and dragged away) is never even spoken about. But it appears in this scene not only as a warning but almost as an enticement to keep leaning forward in the endless progress of strokes. Our sharp-eyed friend Russo noticed it and commented as well.

   It is here, of course, where Ben-Hur is first spotted by the Roman admiral, Quintus Arrius—after the eternity of three years of painful rowing—and admiring his strength and defiance, as well we might presume as recognizing him as the only truly beautiful body existing in this pile of human flesh, which allows him to become unshackled during the impending battle, and which saves both of their lives, finally freeing Ben-Hur from bondage.

      The battle itself in this silent film is absolutely stunning. The detail of the continued ramming of the pirate boats into the Roman fleet, the massive overtaking of the ships themselves, the release of strange weapons such as heated tar and snakes, and indeed the absolute chaos of war is so brilliantly conveyed close up that it almost takes the breath away. If Ben-Hur generally lacks excitement, here is the scene that adventure aficionados have been waiting for.

     There are also close-up scenes of battle in Wyler’s version, but most of it consists of swords and fire rather than the total chaos of killing that is represented in Niblo’s film. Much more time is spent on the heroics of Judah, as he strangles one of the Romans who has been whipping the rowers, steals his keys, and unbuckles the leg irons of the other men, lifting a huge pillar that has fallen with the ramming of the other boat. Heston is always at his best when showing off his grimacing heroic acts. Ben-Hur as hero is the focus of Wyler’s film, while Ben-Hur the survivor is central to Niblo’s movie.

     Best known for his in-depth cinematic scenes, Wyler can hardly be matched once Judah has been made the son of Quintus Arrius and brought home to Rome where becoming a hero for his chariot-racing, a parade in his honor is celebrated throughout the city. Novarro riding through the narrow streets of the city—even if in Niblo’s work it is displayed in Technicolor—although perhaps closer to reality, can never match the grand parade that Wyler whips us through his space of the wide screen that seems to funnel into an endless horizon.

     But once Ben-Hur travels to Antioch, hoping to find more information about the whereabouts of his mother (Claire McDowell) and sister (Tirzah) and where he makes contact once again with Esther (May McAvoy) and her father Simonides (Nigel de Brulier) who has looked after the Hur family’s wealth, the 1925 film again becomes far more interesting as it takes us into the Arab camp of Sheik Ilderim (Mitchell Lewis in Niblo’s work and Hugh Griffith in Wyler’s movie).

      For it is here that when the film turns its attention to the chariot races that things move toward the true center of both works, the unforgettable battle between Messala and Ben-Hur. Both works of cinema present film in a manner that is not only memorable but influential, in Niblo’s case as innovative perhaps as Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps scene in Battleship Potemkin of the same year.    

     Even as the horses and trumpeters who call the race into being as they move out from a dark corridor to the arena of the race, the director and film editor Lloyd Nosler track with a dolly out into the open space before cutting to a view of the massive crowds and then, craning over with a shot that watches the chariots and their horses move to the starting line, cut again to the various boxes in which the central players sit—create a startlingly innovative montage. Almost immediately the scene is transformed again through another high crane view of the arena from the perspective of the Roman guards and horsemen, before returning us to the final destination of the horsemen and their trumpeting of the beginning the race.

    The race itself, with its constant cuts between wide, sweeping views of the chariots in motion intercut with head-on views of the different riders and side perspectives of the wheels, whips, and horses racing directly into the camera create a rhythm that is constantly shifting in its patterns, at several points even putting us at ground level looking up to see the hooves and wheels race over our very beings much like those who have crashed and await help must perceive the action. The variety of views in the original is amazing, while Wyler’s is far centered on the violent interactions of Messala and Ben-Hur which allow the 1925 picture a broader view of the race than the maddened hate by this time controlling the central characters’ actions. If Niblo’s figures claim it will be a battle to the death, Ben Hur wins, ruining Messala financially without robbing him of life, whereas in the 1959 film Messala must die.

 

    The fact that after the race Niblo’s Ben-Hur never again encounters his childhood friend or, if you will have it, former lover, is a failure that Wyler’s writers corrected. The final meeting gives both of them the possibility to end their love-hate struggle, Judah attempting to do so by replying, when Messala declares that Judah has defeated his enemy, “I see no enemy.” But in saying that, as the Roman tribune lies dying is to declare there is no longer any relationship between the two, and accordingly, Messala attempts immediately to goad him back into hate which is, without his love, all that he has left of his former friend. Declaring that the “race is not over,” the race clearly serving as a metaphor to Messala of an emotional relationship with Ben-Hur that is an intense as love. To prove it, he freely admits that Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are still living, but now in the Valley of the Lepers, certain that if anything will bring him back into Judah’s world it is that terrible fact.

     As painful as the news is, however, at least Judah now has been granted the possibility that his mother and sister are still alive, along with the potential of seeing them again. Messala grabs the lapel of his shirt as if it might bind them back into some sort of shared existence even in his death; but once the Roman tribune dies, Ben-Hur simply pulls the grasping hand away—with some difficulty I might add—proving that the relationship with Messala is no longer meaningful, and perhaps never was, at least to him. He is dead, and indeed the “race” is now over.

      Both of the movies wind down into what is a far less interesting relationship of that of Ben-Hur with Esther and, particularly in Niblo’s work, a strangely blasphemous spiritual story wherein Christ, as he carries his cross to Golgotha, is asked to bring back a dead child to life (he does so) and, as Esther pulls Miriam and Tirzah into the crowd where Christ will pass, a focus away from the sacred procession upon her prayers to wipe away their leprosy, which apparently the busy Christ accomplishes—all of it reminding one a bit of some Southern Baptist preacher proclaiming that he can cure all the crippled and the sick if only they believe hard enough. So Dorothy returned to Kansas.

      In Wyler’s work Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are cured offstage from the tears and blood of Christ caught up in the storm waters that wind their way to their leper cave. And Judah himself, recognizing the man who offered him water in the desert now offers Christ the same. All equally blasphemous perhaps, but at least more appealing than the begging Esther and a defeated Ben Hur who has brought together legions of men to save their King only to discover the King is about to be crucified.

      Moreover, Wyler’s film, if it had nothing else going for it, had one of the best musical scores, by Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa, of any epic film ever.

      Russo claims Wyler told Vidal: “The biggest mistake we made was the love story. If we had cut out that girl [Haya Harareet, who played Esther in his version] altogether and concentrated on the two guys, everything would have gone better.”

      That’s a fable I don’t believe. Wyler would never have wanted to steal away a hero’s normative love interest, even if in both movies I noticed that neither Novarro nor Heston ever kiss a woman. Surely any such decision would have thoroughly confused his audience. Although I too might have liked to see both films end with the chariot race, with Ben-Hur rushing back to Rome and a father who adored him, even I perceive why Wyler knew that had he done so he could not possibly have won 11 Academy Awards for his movie, and even I would never have been able to sit through it six times.

      Finally, despite Vidal’s various interesting additions to the lore of this dinosaur of a film, whether or not one wants the love relationship to be centered upon the “two guys or “that girl” and Ben-Hur is a decision that the audience itself must make. There’s no coded message here, it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.

 

Los Angeles, August 8, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).