Astonishingly this movie was nominated for no less than 12 Academy Awards and managed to win 11 of them, a feat not equalled until “Titanic” 40 years later. I say astonishingly because it is really not that good. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The cinematography in Panavision is wonderful and the chariot race is genuinely exciting, but the plotting is slow, most of the dialogue is leaden and a fair bit of the acting is forced, while the appearance of Jesus and the incidence of a miracle appear out of sorts with today’s more secular days. Nevertheless, at the time, the film was a great commercial success which saved MGM from bankruptcy.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on a 19th century novel by civil war general Lew Wallace, it is a strong story of conflict between former childhood friends, Roman officer Messala (Stephen Boyd) and Jewish dignatory Judah Ben-Hur in Roman-occupied Judea at the time of Christ. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At some three and a half hours, the material before and after the chariot race should have been shortened, but the race itself was a triumph for winner of three Best Director Academy Awards, William Wallace. It required 15,000 extras on a set constructed on 18 acres at Cinecitta Studios outside Rome and it took five weeks to film.
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Astonishingly this movie was nominated for no less than 12 Academy Awards and managed to win 11 of them, a feat not equalled until “Titanic” 40 years later. I say astonishingly because it is really not that good. The cinematography in Panavision is wonderful and the chariot race is genuinely exciting, but the plotting is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26511,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26510\/revisions\/26511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}