What remains is the most egregiously boring movie ever graced with the Best Picture Oscar, along with ten other statues - the film set the record for most Oscar wins, and has never since been surpassed, only tied - though in fairness, egregious boredom is one of the cornerstones of the Bible epic genre, with filmmakers generally spending more effort making sure that the film is appropriately solemn and denuded of any sort of fleshiness and emotional effect, in favor of the unsmiling earnestness of a boring day at Sunday School. So that gives us one sequence - a long sequence, to be sure - that does almost all of the work of justifying a gigantic mass of cinema stretching to some three and a half hours, and that without the overture, intermission, and entr'acte.

It has the best action setpiece in any of the American and Italian Bible epics from the 1950s and 1960s (the chariot race, of course), which makes it a strong contender for the best action setpiece made during the whole of the 1950s it has a second action setpiece (the sea battle) that's pretty damn good, though some of its charm is stolen away by comparing it the 1925 silent film Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, and finding that the 34-years-older movie trumps its mega-budget remake pretty soundly in the staging of this scene (mind you, the '25 Ben-Hur was a mega-budget production in its own right, and from an era when if a filmmaker needed a full-scale sea battle, they'd damn well go out and film a full-scale sea battle - models? Forced perspective? What the hell are those?). There's nothing one lowly little film blogger can possibly do to diminish or burnish the reputation of one of Hollywood's all-time Classical Epic Masterworks, so I don't feel even the tiniest bit bad about saying in front of God and everybody: I really don't like the 1959 version of Ben-Hur. While wondering who in the hell they made this movie for, let's return to the most famous, downright iconic version of this material. This week: a third feature-length adaptation of Ben-Hur is, you know, definitely a thing one could choose to produce. Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.

Ben hur 1959 film online