Early last evening I walked into a nearby Walmart and bought the new 4K Ben-Hur 3-disc package. 15 minutes later I popped disc #1 into HE’s 4K Sony Bluray player, and right away I was going “whoa…this looks significantly better than my 2011 Ben-Hur Bluray”…my eyeballs were going boooiinngggg!
Seriously, this puppy is truly exceptional…the details are dazzling…this kind of bump is what 4K should always deliver…the red tunics of the Roman legions are so radiant you might feel a slight urge to wear sunglasses…you can really savor the fabric threads…Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting looks like it’s been painted upon actual plaster…the sparkling eye colors and moist, lived-in skins of men amd women of all ages…the flickering green of olive tree leaves…the gleaming gold-accented chest armor…the chiselled hair patterns of that crouching, giant-sized discus-thrower in the center of the chariot stadium…the exquisite, vibrantly-colored fabrics and robes…all of it. Every shot fills the milk pitcher of your soul.
For the first time in my life I noticed that the late Stephen Boyd (aka Messala) had oversized, oddly-shaped big toes…plus you can see the makeup strokes of Hugh Griffith‘s overly dark, painted-on Arab face more clearly…the blacks are mine-shaft deep, velvety and super-smooth…and while you can see a very fine layer of grain if you put your nose right up to the screen, it’s really almost nonexistent. The 4K Ben-Hur is almost like watching the live Cinecitta sets and actors through a just-cleaned window. I was half-chuckling at this, musing that the grain monks — those fanatical asshats who love heightened, extra-visible grain in Blurays of older films…the grain monks might be upset by this…”too smooth and clean!”
And then 20 minutes into disc #1, it froze….”I just bought this!“, I shouted. I hit eject, popped in my lens-cleaning disc, wiped the newbie clean and started over. It was fine after that but c’mon…20 minutes into your first viewing of a brand new 4K disc and it quits?
I still lose interest after the chariot race sequence ends. The air goes out of the balloon, and it becomes tedious. All of that endless suffering of Martha Scott and Cathy O’Donnell in the Valley of the Lepers…”you mustn’t look upon us, Judah!”…relax already! Okay, you’ve got some ugly warts on your face, but you’re still relatively healthy and able to get around….why not just accept the4 disease and move on and do what you can? Hiding in a cave?…later.
Okay, Robert Surtees‘ tracking camera work during the final two or three minutes is impressive.
“Justice,” posted on 8.5.11:
A couple of decades ago Ben-Hur screenwriter Gore Vidal dismissed the meaning of the title of Lew Wallace‘s 1880 novel, “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.” “It isn’t a tale of the Christ,” said Vidal. “It’s the tale of a war between a Roman boy and a Jewish boy.”
Which is why the movie ends after the chariot race sequence. Finito, resolved. Even though it continues for another half-hour or so because director William Wyler needs to be faithful to Wallace’s pious novel, and so we’re stuck with the sloggish remainder. And all you can do is look at your watch.
The crucifixion finale is supposed to be about Christ’s blood washing away the anger of an unjustly persecuted man and saving his mother and sister from leprosy. But the movie would be massively frustrating without the feeling of justice delivered to Stephen Boyd‘s Messala by what happens to him in the chariot race.
People don’t care about “happy” or “sad” endings — they want endings in which the characters receive their just desserts. Movies always “end” after the moment of justice occurs. The finale of The Godfather, Part II is satisfying because Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone has met with a kind of justice, which is to say a state of solitude and spiritual frigidity after the murder of his brother Fredo. It’s a fate that he’s earned so it feels right.
And Vidal’s gay subtext in the relationship between Messala and Judah is unmistakably there in Ben-Hur. It’s an old story, but I love re-reading it:
Vidal, who wrote much if not most of the screenplay, says in the “Making of Ben-Hur” doc that he suggested to Wyler that the characters’ conflict scenes be written as “a lover’s quarrel.”
“Wyler said, ‘What do you mean?’,” Vidal recalls. “I said, could it be that the two boys had some kind of emotional relationship the first time around, and now the Roman wants to start up again and Ben-Hur doesn’t — and doesn’t get the point?
“Willie said, ‘Gore, this is Ben-Hur. You can’t do that to Ben-Hur.’ I said, well, if you don’t do something like that you won’t have Ben-Hur. You’ll have an emotiveless mess on your hands. And he said, ‘Well … you can’t be overt.’ I said, I’m not gonna be overt. There won’t be one line. But I can write it in such a way that the audience is going to feel that there is something emotional between these two that is not stated, but that blows a fuse in Messala. That he is spurned. So it’s a love scene gone wrong.”
This Ben-Hur newbie really, really looks a lot better than the 2011 version…taken from recent 8K scan of the source materials, polished and spit-shined, etc.