Ben-Hur (1959)

Ben-Hur exists because a Union general lost an argument he did not know he was having. On September 19, 1876, Lew Wallace, a Civil War veteran still smarting from an unfair share of blame for the near-disaster at Shiloh, shared a train compartment to Indianapolis with Robert Ingersoll, the most famous agnostic orator in America. Ingersoll made a habit of testing new acquaintances on their faith, and for hours he pressed Wallace on the evidence for God, for heaven, for Christ, for every claim Christianity asked people to accept on trust.

Wallace considered himself a Christian in the ordinary, unexamined way many nineteenth-century Americans did: he did not attend church regularly, did not pray with any discipline, and by his own later account could not have defended a single one of his beliefs against a determined skeptic. Ingersoll's questions left him less certain of his agnosticism, in an odd sense, than of his own ignorance. Rather than simply reading his way to an answer, Wallace decided to write one: a novel set in the world Jesus walked through, following a fictional witness close enough to the events to make their reality, or their absence, concrete rather than abstract.

The book took him seven years. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880, became one of the best-selling American novels of the nineteenth century, outsold in its own era only by the Bible itself. Ingersoll, who had hoped to win Wallace to skepticism, had instead supplied the occasion for one of the most widely read defenses of Christian faith his country ever produced.

William Wyler's Ben-Hur is built around a decision easy to overlook on a first viewing: the film never shows the face of the man its subtitle names. Jesus appears twice in Judah Ben-Hur's story, offering him water as a condemned prisoner marching through Nazareth and, at the film's close, carrying his cross to Calvary, and both times the camera holds him from behind, at a distance, or in shadow. The role was performed by Claude Heater, an American opera singer, and the choice was neither an accident of budget nor a directorial timidity: it continued a reverence-driven convention biblical epics of the period generally observed, treating Christ's face as a thing the camera should not presume to render.

Around that restraint sits a production of almost the opposite instinct, spectacle without restraint at all. The nine-minute chariot race, still cited as one of the most technically accomplished action sequences ever filmed, took five weeks to shoot on an eighteen-acre arena set built for a million dollars, with a ratio of more than 260 feet of film exposed for every foot that made the final cut. At $15.175 million, Ben-Hur was the most expensive film yet made when it premiered on November 18, 1959.

The gamble paid off decisively. Ben-Hur won eleven of its twelve Academy Award nominations, missing only Best Adapted Screenplay, a record that stood alone for thirty-eight years until Titanic matched it in 1998 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King matched it again in 2003. No film has yet won twelve.