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In the seventh year of the reign of Augustus Caesar, Prince Judah Ben-Hur is born into a wealthy Jewish family about the same time as Jesus Christ. Years later, he is reunited with his boyhood friend, Messala, who has taken over command of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem. When Ben Hur refuses to inform against other Jewish patriots, Messala condemns him to certain death as a galley slave and imprisons his mother, Miriam, and sister, Tirzah, in a dungeon. For three years Ben-Hur suffers the brutalities of Roman war galleys, until he is freed, adopted, and brought to Rome by Quintus Arrius, the Roman Admiral whose life he saves in battle. Though lauded as an athlete and desired by Flavia, a wanton, Ben-Hur insists upon returning to Jerusalem in the hope of tracing his family. On the way he encounters Sheik Ilderim, a lusty Arab who plans to race his chariot against the Romans at the Jerusalem games. Having astonished the Sheik by his horsemanship, Ben Hur arrives at his derelict home and immediately confronts Messala, who tells him that his mother and sister are dead. Ben-Hur now agrees to ride for Ilderim in the chariot race against Messala. He drives Messala to the ground, fatally injured, and accepts the victor's laurel from the Governor, Pontius Pilate. But Messala has his revenge. With his dying breath he tells Ben-Hur that Miriam and Tirzah are alive but lepers. Heartbroken, Ben-Hur defies Pilate and sets out to raise a rebellion. But he is caught up in the procession to Calvary, sees Miriam and Tirzah miraculously healed, and is converted to Christianity. With Christ's death and Ben-Hur's rebirth a new era begins, and Ben-Hur looks forward to a happy future with Esther, the beautiful slave girl who has loved him secretly through the years.

As A Tale of the Christ, Ben-Hur is dignified and conventional, with a solidly academic air reminiscent of some prestige productions of the Thirties. It progresses harmlessly enough from schoolroom scripture-book frescoes of the Byre and the carpenter's shed to the Sermon on the Mount and the more raw, matter-of-fact documentation of the Trial and Golgotha. As the third Hollywood version of Major General Lew Wallace's novel (the first was made in 1907), it seems faithful to the period, 1880, and moral tone in which it was originally written. Freudians may find little difficulty in categorising the relationship between Ben-Hur and Messala as it burgeons from slow, strong handshakes to whip-lashings and a blood-drenched death scene. But in fact the whole thick and tear-bedaubed conception is a Victorian one, embracing as it does Frank Thring's portrayal of Pontius Pilate as an exquisite, Oscar Wildean quean, Haya Harareet's dewy-eyed slave girl, a wilting orgy reminiscent of Intolerance, and the sudden switch in Jack Hawkins' Quintus Arrius from a sort of nineteenth-century flogging headmaster to a Dickensian uncle-figure.

The disadvantages of this approach are obvious. Despite moments of elegiac beauty such as Ben-Hur's return to his ruined Courtyard, William Wyler's handling is for the most part cumbrous and laboured, falling into a series of cliché situations and tableaux, tediously static love scenes and violent crises, to all of which Charlton Heston's hero responds with the rigid propriety of a very tall boy scout. Fortunately there are considerable compensations - some unexpected (the compelling presence and brooding concentration of Stephen Boyd's Messala, the artful comic relief of Hugh Griffith's Welsh-accented sheik), others of the kind one has a right to expect from the third longest and the most expensive ($15,000,000) movie ever made. The galley scenes have a cold, magisterial horror; the pageantry of the arena and the detail of the scenes behind the races have an impressive order and precision; the chariot race itself, staged by Andrew Marion and Yakima Canutt, is a tour de force. And so, for all the film's respect for General Wallace, it is as an exercise in Hollywood's newest tradition of spectacle ballyhoo, and not as a deliberately fustian moral drama, that one of the most enduring myth subjects of the cinema has succeeded in recasting its old, absurdly potent spell.

Though Karl Tunberg's name alone appears on the screenplay credits, Christopher Fry is known to have been responsible for a major rewrite job during actual shooting; and further contributions of one kind or another were made by Gore Vidal and S. N. Behrrnan. The film was shot in Italy, at Cinecitta Studios, by three units. Wyler and Surtees photographed most of the interiors; Marton, Canutt, Soldati and Italian cameraman Piero Portalupi headed the second unit, which concentrated on the chariot race; Richard Thorpe and photographer Harold E. Wellman undertook the galley action scenes, certain arena sequences and some retakes for the other two units.

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