| Rated: G.
Running Time: 222 mins.
I’ve seen Ben-Hur a bizillion times on TV, and had always thought it to be one of the best movies to come out of Hollywood’s “epic” era.
You see, in the late 40’s and 50’s, the movie mavens of Hollywoodland were in quite the tizzy over the new fangled invention, Television. TV had made astonishing inroads in the entertainment industry in just a few years, and box office was dropping for movies. So Hollywoodland fought back. They did this by making movies spectacular - bigger and better than TV could ever hope to be. In 1959, MGM made the biggest movie ever - Ben-Hur. And what an epic it turned out to be! More than fifty thousand actors appear in the film (talk about your cast of thousands) and three hundred sixty-five actors were given speaking parts. Principal roles were given to forty-five actors. The legendary chariot race sequence was filmed on the backlot of Cinecitta Studios outside of Rome, and it is still the largest motion picture set ever built. It required almost a million feet of lumber and over a million pounds of plaster, and covered more than eighteen acres. That’s larger than many clearcuts, you know.
To enclose this huge spectacle, director William Wyler filmed the movie in MGM Camera 65, using the Panavision 65 millimetre camera, and then blowing up the movie to an awesome aspect ratio of 2.76:1! Remember than a ‘normal’ Panavision movie you see today has an aspect ratio of 2.43:1, while the ‘standard’ widescreen ratio is only 1.85:1. Now I had seen this movie on TV a number of times (as I said), but that was in the cropped pan and scan mode. I had never seen the movie in it’s original size and scope, and I was amazingly excited about seeing the film. I was not disappointed.
Ben-Hur is huge. The sets are astonishing. The action sequences are superb, staged with verve and panache that even today’s Schwarzenegger actioners are hard pressed to match. And to top this all off, the cast featured the renowned Charlton Heston in the title role of Judah Ben-Hur, and Jack Hawkins as his life-long friend and deadliest enemy, Massala, the Roman.
I doubt I have to tell you the story, set against the times of the life of Jesus Christ, but it involves betrayal, slavery, and the rising up against all odds to achieve a goal and your destiny. It has romance, excitement, the awesome galley battle on the high seas, and of course, the chariot race. Now I’ve seen just about every actioner made, from The French Connection with it’s astonishing car chase sequence to Terminator 2’s never ending pulse pounding sequences, and Jurassic Park, which doesn’t let up once the action starts. Nothing, and I mean nothing - compares to the chariot race in Ben-Hur. You will be at the edge of your seat for the entire sequence, and love every minute of it.
This special edition laser disc set is in the full feature CAV format, so even if you just have an old cheap disc player, you can do the freeze-frame bit (in order to catch the two famous errors in the chariot sequence - keep your eye out for the Timex) and all the other cool stuff that discs can do. In addition, MGM has isolated the musical tracks on the second analog audio track. That’s so you can sit back and listen to the beautiful orchestration without any of the other annoying things on the track - like dialogue and stuff. The ninth side of this set features the documentary Ben-Hur: The Making of an Epic as well as the original theatrical trailer. As with most classic compilations (such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Ten Commandments) the package also includes the Overture.
If you want to see the most acclaimed and most awesome movie Hollywood has ever made (remember that it won a still-record eleven academy awards), then you have no choice but to see it in this format. |
