Category: Action
All Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama, Romance
Release Year: 1959
Country: USA
Runtime: 212
Rating: 4.4 (0)
Languages: English
Director: William Wyler
Sound: Dolby, 70 mm 6-Track
Taglines:

Writing by: Lew Wallace – (novel) (as General Lew Wallace)
Karl Tunberg – (screenplay)
Maxwell Anderson – uncredited and
Christopher Fry – uncredited and
Gore Vidal – uncredited

Produced by: Sam Zimbalist – producer
William Wyler – producer (uncredited)

Cast: Charlton Heston – Judah Ben-Hur
Jack Hawkins – Quintus Arrius
Haya Harareet – Esther
Stephen Boyd – Messala
Hugh Griffith – Sheik Ilderim
Martha Scott – Miriam
Cathy ODonnell – Tirzah
Sam Jaffe – Simonides
Finlay Currie – Balthasar
Frank Thring – Pontius Pilate
Terence Longdon – Drusus

Music: Miklós Rózsa
Official Website: Visit Website


Plot Outline: When a Jewish prince is betrayed and sent into slavery by a Roman friend, he regains his freedom and comes back for revenge.
Plot: Judah Ben-Hur lives as a rich Jewish prince and merchant in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1st century. Together with the new governor his old friend Messala arrives as commanding officer of the Roman legions. At first they are happy to meet after a long time but their different politic views separate them. During the welcome parade a brick falls down from Judahs house and barely misses the governor. Although Messala knows that they are not guilty he sends Judah to the galleys and throws his mother and sister into prison. But Judah swears to come back and take revenge.

Crazy Credits: We know about 1 Crazy Credits. One of them reads:
The M-G-M lion is shown in still-frame at the beginning, rather than roaring.

Goofs: We know about 25 goofs. Here comes one of them:
Anachronisms: In the chariot scene, one of the trumpeters is wearing a watch. (One observer claims this is simply an unfortunately positioned shadow.)

Trivia: There are 73 entries in the trivia list – like these:

• MGM wanted an authentic-looking Roman boat for the live battle scenes. To design the boats, they hired a person who had spent his whole career studying Roman naval architecture. When he presented his designs to the MGM engineers, Mauro Zambuto (set engineer) exclaimed, “But this is top heavy! It will sink!” They built the boat anyway and launched it in the ocean, and at first it seemed to float. Then however, a little wave came along, a wake from another boat, splashed against the highly unstable boat, and tipped it over. MGM then put the boat in a large pond with a huge painted sky backdrop. To steady the boat, they ran cables from the bottom of the boat to anchors on the bottom of the pond.
• Another problem concerned the color of the water in the pond holding the boat; it was too brown and murky. They hired a chemist to develop a dye to color the water Azure Mediterranean blue. The chemist dumped a huge sack of some powder into the pond, which, instead of turning the water blue, formed a hard crust on the surface of the water, which had to be chiselled off the boat at great expense. They finally found some dye that would make the water blue. During one of the battle scenes, an extra who fell into the water and spent a bit too much time there turned blue, and was kept on the MGM payroll until it wore off.
• When it came time to film inside the boat, it was discovered that the large 65mm cameras wouldnt fit. The boat had to be taken out of the pond, cut in half lengthwise, and placed in an Italian sound stage. The oars wouldnt fit in the soundstage, so they had to cut them off just beyond the hull. This resulted in an extremely light oars which, when rowed by the actors, didnt look believable, since you could move them with one hand. To solve the problem, Zambuto sent an army of production assistants to all of the hardware stores in Rome to buy the kind of spring-and-hydraulic piston mechanisms that are normally attached to doors to force them closed but to keep them from slamming. Placing these devices on the oars and the hull gave enough resistance to make the rowing scenes look realistic.