About Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)
The story behind the film
Long before Charlton Heston drove a chariot in the 1959 version, there was this: the original big-screen Ben-Hur, and the most expensive film of the silent era. It is based on General Lew Wallace's 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, one of the best-selling American books of the 19th century, which had also been a hugely successful stage play for about twenty-five years.
The Goldwyn company bought the film rights in 1922, and shooting began in Rome in October 1923. The production quickly ran into trouble: the first director, Charles Brabin, was replaced by Fred Niblo; the original star, George Walsh, was replaced by Ramon Novarro; and costs spiralled. While the film was still in production, Goldwyn merged into the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which eventually brought the whole production back to California, where filming resumed in the spring of 1925. By the end the budget had reached about $3.9 million, an enormous sum for the time.
The story follows Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Jewish prince in Roman-occupied Judaea, who is betrayed by his childhood friend Messala, now a Roman officer. Condemned to the galleys while his mother and sister are imprisoned, Judah survives a sea battle, wins the favour of a Roman admiral, and returns years later to face Messala in the arena. His story runs alongside, and finally meets, the life of Jesus.
Cast & crew
- Directed by Fred Niblo; scenario by June Mathis (with additional writers)
- Ramon Novarro as Judah Ben-Hur
- Francis X. Bushman as Messala
- May McAvoy as Esther
- Betty Bronson as Mary
- Carmel Myers as Iras
- Second-unit direction by B. Reeves Eason and Christy Cabanne
Why it's worth watching
The chariot race is the reason this film is legendary. Shot on a huge arena set with many cameras, it still feels breathtakingly fast and dangerous a century later, and many viewers find it every bit as exciting as the famous 1959 version. The sea battle, with its ramming galleys, is almost as spectacular. Ramon Novarro makes an athletic, sympathetic hero, and Francis X. Bushman's Messala is a satisfyingly arrogant villain.
The religious sequences are handled with great restraint — Jesus is never shown in full, only as a hand or a figure at the edge of the frame — and several of them were filmed in two-colour Technicolor, giving them a striking, glowing look.
Fun facts
- About 200,000 feet of film was shot for the chariot race; editor Lloyd Nosler cut it down to roughly 750 feet for the finished film.
- One of the assistant directors on the Technicolor sequences was a young William Wyler, who went on to direct the 1959 remake that won 11 Oscars.
- Ben-Hur became MGM's highest-grossing film up to that time, yet its huge costs meant it still recorded a loss.
- For decades the colour sequences were thought lost, until they were found in the Czechoslovak Film Archive in the 1980s.
- In 1997 the film was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry.
Public-domain status
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was released in 1925. US copyright on works published that year expired at the end of 2020, so the film entered the US public domain on January 1, 2021. See "Rights & source" below.