Ben-Hur (1959 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Ben-Hur, the 1959 epic directed by William Wyler, arrived at a moment when Hollywood was fighting for its life. Television had eaten into ticket sales, and the consent decree of 1948 had forced studios to sell off their theater chains. MGM was in financial distress. Studio head Joseph Vogel made a desperate gamble: commit $15.175 million to a single film about a Jewish prince in ancient Jerusalem. That figure made Ben-Hur the most expensive movie ever produced at the time. The budget would more than double from its original estimate of $7 million. What follows is the story of how 10,000 extras, 200 camels, 2,500 horses, and a nine-minute chariot race saved a studio, swept eleven Academy Awards, and shaped the sound of Hollywood action films for the next fifteen years.

• 2. A Studio's Desperate Bet

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  MGM had first announced a remake of the 1925 silent Ben-Hur back in December 1952, with Stewart Granger and Robert Taylor reportedly in the running for the lead. Nine months later the studio said it would shoot in CinemaScope beginning in 1954. By November 1953 producer Sam Zimbalist was attached and screenwriter Karl Tunberg was hired. Sidney Franklin was set to direct, with Marlon Brando intended for the lead role. That entire plan collapsed when Franklin resigned and MGM suspended production in early 1956.

  The revival came from a rival's success. Paramount Pictures released The Ten Commandments in 1956, and its Biblical box-office performance persuaded Vogel that a similar gamble might rescue MGM. In September 1955, Zimbalist had already estimated a $7 million production. By February 1958, press reports placed the cost at $10 million. By the time cameras rolled it had reached $15.175 million. William Wyler, who had been one of 30 assistant directors on the 1925 original, was approached in early 1957. He initially rejected the project, calling the script 'very primitive, elementary.' Zimbalist showed him storyboards for the chariot race and told him MGM would spend up to $10 million. That changed Wyler's mind.

  Wyler did not formally sign on until September 1957, and MGM did not publicly announce his hiring until the 3rd of January 1958. His deal included a base salary of $350,000 plus 8 percent of gross box-office receipts. That salary was, at the time, the largest ever paid to a director for a single film. Wyler later admitted openly that he wanted to outdo Cecil B. DeMille and make what he called a 'thinking man's' Biblical epic. Producer Zimbalist died of a heart attack on the 4th of November 1958, aged 57, while still on set.

• 3. The Script Nobody Agreed On

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  Lew Wallace's 1880 novel ran to about 550 pages. According to Gore Vidal, more than 12 versions of the screenplay had been written by various writers by the spring of 1958. Tunberg cut the story aggressively: he removed everything in the book after the crucifixion of Jesus, dropped the sub-plot where Ben-Hur fakes his death and raises a Jewish army, and changed how the leprous women are healed. Zimbalist considered the result 'pedestrian' and 'unshootable.'

  Playwright S. N. Behrman came in first to revise. Maxwell Anderson followed. Gore Vidal arrived in Rome in early March 1958. He agreed to work for three months to come off suspension under his MGM contract, though Zimbalist pushed him to stay through the entire production. Vidal had been researching a novel about the 4th-century Roman emperor Julian and brought deep knowledge of ancient Rome to the dialogue. He kept the structure from previous drafts but rewrote nearly all the lines. His one lasting structural change split the reunion between Ben-Hur and Messala into two separate scenes: a first meeting at the Castle Antonia, then a later argument that ends their friendship at Ben-Hur's home.

  Vidal later claimed he added a homoerotic subtext between the two men, telling Boyd to play Messala as a spurned lover while keeping Heston unaware. Wyler said he remembered no such conversation. A letter from the film's publicity director Morgan Hudgens to Vidal in late May 1958 implied there was something to it, writing of the two actors in the reunion scene: 'You should have seen those boys embrace!' Wyler said he discarded Vidal's draft in favor of Christopher Fry's. Fry, who arrived in Rome in early May 1958 and worked six days a week until the picture was finished, gave the dialogue a more formal, archaic tone without making it sound stilted. He rewrote as much as a third of what Vidal had written in the first half of the script. The final screenplay ran to 230 pages, and a bitter Screen Writers' Guild credit dispute followed. In 1996, Charlton Heston published a letter in the Los Angeles Times saying Vidal's account 'irritates the hell out of me.' Three months later, Vidal published a 1,200-word response.

• 4. Building Ancient Rome in Italy

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  Cinecittà Studios, a massive production facility built on the outskirts of Rome in 1937, was chosen as the primary location. Pre-production began there around October 1957. The MGM Art Department produced more than 15,000 sketches of costumes, sets, and props before a single frame was shot. More than a million props were ultimately manufactured.

  Costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden oversaw 100 wardrobe fabricators who began making costumes a full year before filming started. The budget called for more than 100,000 costumes and 1,000 suits of armor. Silk was imported from Thailand, armor made in West Germany, woolens produced in the United Kingdom and South America, and boots and shoes came from Italian shoemakers. Women in the Piedmont region of Italy donated hair that was used to make wigs and beards. The production used 300 sets across nine sound stages. Several sets left standing from Quo Vadis in 1951 were refurbished and reused.

  The village of Arcinazzo Romano, outside Rome, stood in for Nazareth. Beaches near Anzio served as other locations, and caves south of the city became the leper colony. The reconstruction of Jerusalem's ancient streets covered a vast area and included a full-height Jaffa Gate. Wealthy Romans who wanted to play their ancient selves volunteered as extras in the villa scenes. The sets were visible from the outskirts of Rome, and MGM estimated that more than 5,000 people were given tours. Dismantling them afterward cost $125,000. The Libyan government had canceled the production's filming permit on the 11th of March 1958, just a week before location shooting in North Africa was set to begin, citing religious objections.

• 5. Nine Minutes That Cost a Million Dollars

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  Planning for the chariot race took nearly a year. Seventy-eight horses were bought and imported from Yugoslavia and Sicily in November 1957, then trained by Hollywood animal handler Glenn Randall to pull a quadriga. Andalusian horses played Ben-Hur's Arabians; Lipizzan horses filled out the rest of the field. The Danesi Brothers firm built 18 chariots, nine for practice. The chariot arena, modelled on a historic circus in Jerusalem, was the largest film set ever built at that time. It cost $1 million and took a thousand workmen more than a year to carve from a rock quarry.

  Second unit directors Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt filmed the entire sequence first with stunt doubles, edited it together, and showed the result to Wyler, Zimbalist, and Heston as a blueprint for where the close-up shots should go. Seven thousand extras were hired for the stands. Shooting the chariot race took five weeks spread over three months. The footage-to-screen ratio reached 263:1, one of the highest ever recorded for a film.

  The race's most memorable moment came from an accident. Stunt man Joe Canutt, Yakima's son, was thrown into the air and suffered a minor chin injury. Marton wanted to keep the shot, but Zimbalist found it unusable. Marton then conceived showing Ben-Hur clinging to the front of his chariot and scrambling back in. The long shot of Canutt's fall was cut together with a close-up of Heston climbing aboard. Boyd did almost all his own stunts, including the close-up where Messala is dragged beneath the horses. A dummy was used only for the trampling itself. One persistent urban legend claims a stuntman died during filming; another claims a red Ferrari is visible during the race. Heston dismissed both in DVD commentary, adding a third legend: that he wore a wristwatch during the chariot sequence, which he denied by pointing to the leather bracers on his forearms.

• 6. Miklós Rózsa and the Longest Score

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  Miklós Rózsa had already scored Quo Vadis and most of MGM's major historical films of the 1950s when he was brought in for Ben-Hur. He researched Greek and Roman music to ground the score in historical authenticity. Rózsa directed the 100-piece MGM Symphony Orchestra across 12 recording sessions that stretched over 72 hours. The soundtrack was recorded in six-channel stereo.

  More than three hours of music were composed. Two-and-a-half hours made it into the finished film. That made the Ben-Hur score the longest ever composed for a motion picture at that time. It held that record until 2021, when the near four-hour score of Zack Snyder's Justice League surpassed it. The score was so long that it had to be released in 1959 on three LP records. A separate one-LP version was also issued, conducted by Carlo Savina with the Symphony Orchestra of Rome. Rózsa also arranged a 'Ben-Hur Suite' for Lion Records, an MGM subsidiary that sold low-priced releases. That made the Ben-Hur score the first film score released both in its entirety and as a separate condensed album.

  Rózsa won his third Academy Award for the work. The score's influence ran deep through Hollywood for the following decade. It began to fade in the mid-1970s when John Williams's music for Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark reshaped what audiences and composers expected from a film score. The Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra reissued selections in 1967, the National Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus in the United Kingdom put out tracks on Decca Records in 1977, and Sony Music issued a two-CD set in 1991. In 2012, a limited-edition five-CD set appeared from Film Score Monthly WaterTower Music.

• 7. Eleven Oscars and What Followed

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  Ben-Hur premiered at Loew's State Theatre in New York City on the 18th of November 1959. Present that night were Wyler, Heston, Stephen Boyd, Haya Harareet, Martha Scott, and Ramon Novarro, who had played Judah Ben-Hur in the 1925 silent version. The film earned $33.6 million in North American theater rentals during its initial release and another $32.5 million outside North America, for a worldwide total of roughly $66.1 million in rental earnings. It was number one at the monthly U.S. box office for six months running. It made a profit of $20,409,000 on its initial release and another $10.1 million when re-released in 1969. At the time, it ranked as the second highest-grossing film in history, behind only Gone with the Wind.

  At the 32nd Academy Awards, Ben-Hur won all eleven categories where it was nominated, out of twelve total nominations. The only loss was Best Adapted Screenplay, which went to Room at the Top. Most observers attributed that defeat to the controversy over who actually wrote the script. The eleven wins set a record that stood until Titanic matched it in 1998 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King matched it again in 2004. Producer Sam Zimbalist's Best Picture award was posthumous; so was the art direction Oscar shared by William A. Horning and Edward C. Carfagno. The film also won three Golden Globes, the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Film.

  Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called it 'a remarkably intelligent and engrossing human drama.' Ronald Holloway writing for Variety predicted that Gone with the Wind 'will eventually have to take a back seat.' Rotten Tomatoes, drawing on 54 collected reviews, reports an 87 percent positive rating with an average score of 8.20 out of 10. In 2004, the National Film Preservation Board added Ben-Hur to the National Film Registry for being 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.' Warner Bros. announced on the 30th of December 2025 that a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release would follow on the 17th of February 2026.