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.
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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).
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