BEN HUR(1959)
Winner of 11 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Actor
Supporting Actor, Director, Music & Costume Design!
While there are portions that are religious in nature,
this is not a religious movie, at least not til the very
end of the movie where it takes a huge turn! This is quite
long at 3 hours and 32 minutes. But the time, like the
movie The Titanic, seems to flow by quickly!
Set in the first century, a Jewish prince is sold into
slavery by his friend who has just been made second in
comand under Ceasar and this is his story tries of him
trying to get his life back! A lot of action(the chariot
race is one of the best races of all time on film!) and
great ambiance and one of those movie you need to have
on your bucket list to watch before you die!! A
From a reviewer at Amazon.com:
Ben-Hur scooped an unprecedented 11 Academy Awards
in 1959 and, unlike some later rivals, richly deserved every
single one. This is epic filmmaking on a scale that had not
been seen before and is unlikely ever to be seen again. But
it's not just running time or a cast of thousands that makes
an epic, it's the subject matter, and here the subject--Prince
Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and his estrangement from
old Roman pal Messala (Stephen Boyd)--is rich, detailed, and
sensitively handled. Director William Wyler, who had been a
junior assistant on MGM's original silent version back in 1925,
never sacrifices the human focus of the story in favor of
spectacle, and is aided immeasurably by Miklos Rozsa's
majestic musical score, arguably the greatest ever written
for a Hollywood picture. At four hours it's a long haul (especially
given some of the portentous dialogue), but all in all, Ben-Hur
is a great movie, best seen on the biggest screen
possible. --Mark Walker