Hacker Cinema
Ben-Hur
1959 · Film · 212 min
Directed by William Wyler
In ancient Judea, a Jewish aristocrat opposing Roman occupation of his homeland reunites with his childhood friend, now a Roman commander — setting in motion a saga of betrayal, adventure, tragedy, revenge, and faith.
7 positive2 negative22 neutralfrom 31 commenters
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33 comments on Hacker News
I rarely read about the contribution a good music score has to a movie's popularity. A great score makes the movie. For example,
The Blue Max, Ben Hur, the first Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dr Zhivago, Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and, of course, Blade Runner!
Not op but if I’m being honest, I don’t feel as if that’s the case until I see a film whose special effects are limited to mise en scene and matte paintings and then I always have this overwhelming feeling that we’re all missing out.
Films on film using in camera effects are still made on occasion but they’re art films for niche audiences.
But we’ll never get another Ben Hur. And that doesn’t sit well with me even if society can’t yet fully explain why.
moviegoing has always been evolving. from kinetoscopes to grand movie palaces to suburban multiplexes. nothing has ever stayed the same for long in cinema.
heck, most theaters used to be continuous program viewing, meaning you’d show up not knowing what was playing, halfway through a movie, cartoon, or newsreel. scheduled viewing was pretty rare until the early 60s, only reserved for tentpole movies like Gone With The Wind or Ben-Hur.
in some ways, where we are heading is back to where we were: tentpole cultural moments like Barbie or Avatar thrive, but the bread and butter of entertainment happens informally, but now at home.
Your pedantry probably requires a rewatch.
I also think "masterpiece" is a heavy term to throw around but the emotional impact of the this series and the complexity of its narrative as it catalogs a hero's journey from reluctant participant to true believer with an epic story arc can be held up next to most film and historical epics like Laurence of Arabia, Ben Hur, The Matrix, the Original Star Wars trilogy, Dune, Kingdom of Heaven, Gladiator, The Handmaid's Tale (series), The Odyssey (epic poem). His personal journey which leads to his persecution and enslavement, his role in leading a slave uprising, rescuing his friends from the aftermath of a rebel uprising, building the foundations of a rebel army, risking his life countless times and ultimately sacrificing himself to prevent his enemy from having an insurmountable edge.
The series makes the very popular "Avengers" film series look like trite dogshit and does the same for most of the "Star Wars" sequels and prequels so I don't fault people for using the term "masterpiece".
Even modern film is often not great, particularly theatre prints that aren't explicitly made for archival purposes. There was a fascinating YouTube video recently where the author pushes back on the purported superiority of fan-scanned 4Ks now competing with official, studio-supervised restorations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQwQRFLFDd8
Obviously DNR and bad HDR jobs are kind of their own issue, but he focuses specifically on coloring and the notion that theatre prints are themselves often wildly inconsistent and change over time, so it can be extremely difficult to even establish a baseline for what a film was meant to look like or even what it actually looked like upon release.
As a modest 4K collector myself, it frustrates me when certain films seem to sit in indefinite limbo, but Amadeus (released this week) looks fabulous and was absolutely worth the wait, so I have hopes that the people taking their time to do right by films like Ben Hur and The Sound of Music are doing so for the right reasons.
>You write like you were born after all the events related to the desktop application had run their curse.
>We killed the desktop app, to free ourselves from the Wintel monopoly.
Bombastic nonsensical crap!
There is no "we”, period. That is a fallacy that you, not "we", impose upon yourself, and try to generalize it to, or foist it upon, everyone.
"We" didn't kill anything. and "we" were not slaves in the first place, so "we" didn't need to make ourselves free.
Maybe you, and some known to you, were slaves, or still are. Don't generalize vacuously.
This is not the multiple Oscar-winning award-winning Ben-Hur movie or the Biblical story of the ancient Israelites as slaves in Egypt or something like that.
Anyone, who wanted to, or at least, any reasonably large group of people (1), could have moved off, from Windows, if they wanted to, badly enough. In the early years of Windows, DOS was still there, right? And had plenty of good software on it, just not GUI-based. and there were some Unix versions around, including maybe some cheaper ones. I rememember Coherent Unix and ESIX, for example. I actually work on the latter, briefly, in an early job. Microsoft's own Xenix existed around the same time too, plus or minus a year or three, maybe.
(1) Say a few hundred or a few thousand people. As an example, they could have collected donations, and hired 20 to 50 smart computer science students, grad or undergrad, and / or professors and / or operating system developers, to create a better OS without the monopoly and bad practices of MS. You bet your ass, at least some people would have queued up for that.
Set up some rules for correct behaviour, and kick out anybody who did not comply.
>We pushed the migration to the Web, because that was the unreachable niche for Microsoft and their monopolistic practices.
So, your only option is to run away from an enemy? And do you think that the enemy cannot follow you there? What about WSL and Azure and what not? Ha ha. Never underestimate your enemies.
See the Stockdale Paradox. The Jim Collins version is a good one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42153495
The first time I watched The Rise of Skywalker it was just too much being thrown at my brain. The second and third watch was much easier to process of course. I'm a big fan of older movies and have noticed the shot length difference anecdotally - Lawrence of Arabia and Ben Hur are two of my favorites. So I suppose it all makes sense to me now that there is actually a comparison measurement that has been completed.
It's difficult though.
A lot of societies up through the ages depicted themselves unrealistically, and our depiction of past societies can be rather questionable too. Cast a glance at https://www.moviestillsdb.com/movies/ben-hur-i52618 if you want.
Those pictures of nazis were clearly wrong, but describing something as wrong is easier than saying what's right. Should an AI match a society's prejudiced descriptions of itself (making the nazis blond), our later images, often also prejudiced, or the current best (yet fuzzy) historical notions of what reality was like?
That's a legit assessment, though I didn't feel as if De Laurentiis had in fact preserved the mythology. Again: far more time would have been required.
Checking, it appears that among the longest-running mainstream films of all time were Cleopatra (243 minutes, or 4h8m), Gone With the Wind (238 minutes, or 3h58m), Lawrence of Arabia (222 minutes), and Ben Hur (217 minutes).
Gandhi, which I recall being remarkable at the time and including an intermission, ran only 191 minutes, or 3h11m.
The full Lord of the Rings trilogy runs 9h17m.
<https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/the-top-15-longest-hollywood-movies/>
What is this the it looks scary crowd for cars now. I thought that was just about gun regulation that the scarier the gun the more dangerous it is even when an identical gun in all things but shape is less scary.
Cars aren't covered in bubble wrap and safety foam on the outside for many many decades they were all steel on the outside now due to mileage regulations they are making them more out of polymers and plastics and aluminum. Those corners aren't razors and even if they were more rounded it's going to hurt like a son of a bitch to get hit by a car. They're making it out to be like it's a chariot from the Ben-Hur movie or something out of Mad Max.
Getting pasted by that thing as a pedestrian is going to be the same as getting pasted by an Escalade or a Land Rover defender which apparently meets the European pedestrian impact rating.
I love Ben Hur! The book is slightly longer than the movie, and has angles not in the movie at all. That's not to say either is lesser. I think both of them are quite representative of the story. If you want to discuss this, I'm on twitter with the same ID.
It's extremely violent, borderline-surreal in some places, excruciatingly slow in others (by design), occasionally has two or three levels of story-within-a-story. Unlike some of his other novels, it's more of an epic than a story, which is usually very hard to put on film. The closest I can think of is something like Ben-Hur or Apocalypse Now (which adapted Conrad's Heart of Darkness); both were famously plagued by production issues.
Charlton Heston's peak was in the 1950's, which was a very different era for movies. Judging him by his performances in cheesy sci-fi movies isn't entirely fair if you haven't seen Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments, and avoided the trap of thinking that our modern fashions are the last word in good art (be that acting or filmmaking more generally).
The article doesn't say that Ben-Hur was lost. It says that another movie, The Devil Dancer, by the same director was lost.
>academic film-art blockbusters like Ben Hur
Wat
> I will give you the enjoyable b-movies, but also remind you that those have existed always, and often in greater numbers.
Don't think this is true. If you consider a lot of self-produced Youtube clips as C-movies, there are way more today. And audiences have voted for what they want: they want more lower-production-cost movies in their exact niche than academic film-art blockbusters like Ben Hur.
You haven't seen the silent Wizard of Oz.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0016544
or the 1929 Ben Hur. Yes, the sea battle and chariot race in the 1929 version were great, but the rest needed a remake.
The remakes after the 1959 version were all "what were they thinking" pointless.
Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" remake was much better than the earlier animated version.
Jackson's "Hobbit" trilogy was just unwatchable. It seems like after the huge success of LotR, everyone around Jackson said nothing but "yes sir, yes sir, three bags full sir!"
The budget breakdown you just linked is fine for what I am describing.
The logic here is a little strange but it does explain why more recent movies especially sequels dominate that list. More recent films have larger audiences due to population growth and ticket prices have kept up with inflation. That means more recent films have a larger likely revenue stream especially sequels for popular movies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films EX: Ben-Hur the most expensive movie that had been made in 1959 at the equivalent of 158 million and pulled in the equivalent of 900 million would hardly worth mentioning as a major film today.
Actors/directors/screenwriters/music rights holders/etc are going to negotiate based on the potential revenues therefore the larger the potential revenue the more they want to be paid upfront.
Now, that doesn’t directly impact shooting or special effects budgets, but if you’re already spending 100+ million on the “Actors/directors/screenwriters/music rights holders/etc” then there is little reason to economize on the special effects budget. Trying to economize at that point is just not worth the risk especially when the budget is fixed before you start. Might as well keep things padded at that point.
Say what you will about the Hays Code, but I would hardly consider Gone With the Wind, The Great Dictator, Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, Sunset Boulevard, The Ten Commandments, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Psycho, West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, To Kill a Mockingbird, Paths of Glory, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, or, you know, Citizen Kane to be especially "crappy" movies.
The second film will probably stand forever as one of the most monumental achievements in practical action and stunt cinematography. Look into the making of the highway chase scene, it's unbelievable and what they did building an entire highway for all the stunts. Kind of like the real chariot race in the 50's version of Ben Hur, there are some movies that do something so spectacular it will never be done again.
But implied translation into the language of the audience is a long-standing convention. We don't watch Ben Hur or Spartacus or I, Claudius and wonder why the Romans are all speaking English instead of Classical Latin.
But it might jar to hear a group of aliens natively speaking Dutch, for example. (Unless it's a Dutch film for a Dutch audience, of course, in which case it might equally jar to hear them speaking English.)
if we do a naive inflation adjustment to 2021 dollars:
star wars ANH: $50 million
star wars ESB: $100 million
star wars RoTJ: $90 million
lawrence of arabia: $137 million
ben hur: $144 million
so yeah, the movies you mentioned had significantly larger budgets, but not massively so (at least compared to ESB and RoTJ). I'd argue the bigger difference is the subject matter. you can do a large 1930's battle without CGI just by throwing money at the problem. there isn't an amount of money you could spend in 1970 to do any of the prequel trilogy coruscant scenes. they probably could have done most of the naboo scenes, though.
I'm also not arguing that huge CGI renders are always a good thing. most stories are really just about the interactions between a few people. I do think it's a significant value add for the scifi genre especially, where the world itself is often a character.
I haven’t seen any of the religious films outside of Ben Hur, but the art and values lists seem pretty solid.
I can think of at least 4 big movie theaters in DC that did this.
The Uptown used to do revivals between big releases. I saw Blade Runner, Ben Hur, 2001, and other classics there. They did not make money on those and had to convert to 100% current releases. I think it is now closed.
The Air & Space IMAX theater used to do “Sci Fi Sundays” where they played a classic science fiction movie on Sunday evenings as the last showing.
The Avalon is in one of the richest neighborhoods on DC/MD border. When it went bankrupt all the neighbors pooled their money and started a nonprofit to keep it open.
The AFI has a theater in a MD suburb, which shows all sorts of revivals and classics year round.
In every one of these theaters I am always shocked to see how few people a classic pulls in. Went to see Blade Runner “Final Cut” at AFI on a huge screen and there were like 40 people. 2001 in a 70mm print was about half full. Inception or Interstellar in IMAX (the real one, 70 ft tall screen) was less than half full.
A small takeaway is that, with so much historical catalog, the audience is very finely chopped up. Only a relatively small % of people love each old movie enough to rally to the theater at a specific night and time.
The big takeaway is how crucial strong marketing is for theater attendance. Undoubtedly there were many available casual fans who simply did not know about these showings. Mass marketing is hard and expensive.
"Bigger", as in IMAX, did not come from Expo 67. It came from a long line of attempts to make really wide screen films. Cinerama (1952), Todd-AO (1953), Cinemascope (1953), etc. The really wide screen systems required custom theaters and very elaborate machinery, and never really caught on. Cinemascope requires just a lens adapter for an ordinary 35MM projector, and it went mainstream.
What to do with widescreen cinematically was a big problem in the early days. Roller coaster demo reels introduced Cinemascope [1] and Todd-AO.[2]. 3D was tried in the same time period. Theaters were trying to do things TV could not do. But how do you tell a story on a huge screen without the screen getting in the way of the story? Most of the time, the screen won. (See the ending of "How the West Was Won" (1962).[3]) Michael Anderson (Around the World in 80 Days), not Kroitor, seems to be the director who figured that out. You make big-budget spectacles, with a plot in glorious locations. Ben-Hur and Cleopatra followed.
That's still the problem with IMax. The giant screen wins over the story.
[1] https://player.vimeo.com/video/266574534
[2] https://youtu.be/MU76gdjr-Dk
[3] https://youtu.be/8t_qToyqiOU?t=76
For me, "Fellini Satyricon" is his most remarkable film, even if not his greatest and certainly not his most popular. No film about the Roman world has conveyed so graphically what must have been the actual, enormous strangeness of classical times. It's a disturbing film, both a picaresque sex comedy and a nightmare of everyday superstition and casual violence.
In comparison, the most famous works of cinema about ancient Rome -- Ben-Hur, Spartacus, I Claudius, and so forth -- are laughably sanitized and similar to our own world, which is the common failing of most historical drama of course. Fellini ditched the convention by, among other things, staying extremely faithful to the original source. The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter is a jolting and bizarre read. A lot of the humor and wordplay, I'm told, is lost in translation.
Have you never seen Ben-Hur? It's an amazing movie with a classic chariot racing scene.
The '90s were twenty years ago. It's not that long, but about the same amount as time between the original Star Wars and The Phantom Menace. Or between the Batman movie with Adam West and Tim Burton's Batman. And it was only 34 years from the silent version of Ben Hur to the Technicolor classic.
Think about this, since it's the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. When that festival happened, rock and roll[1] music wasn't even 20 years old.
[1] https://www.knkx.org/post/we-agree-was-first-ever-recorded-rock-and-roll-song
Why did you exclude the highest grossing film that year from the list? It seems you just selected the movies you thought helped you point.
Movies among the top ten grossing which you left out of the list:
- Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
- Tarzan
- Big Daddy
- The Mummy
- Runaway Bride
- The World Is Not Enough
- The Blair Witch Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1999_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States#cite_note-2
I do agree Hollywood is different today, but rehashing ideas is nothing new.
The Godfather was a book. Twelve Angry Men was a play. Ben Hur (1956) was remake of Ben Hur (1925). All the songs in Singing in the Rain was recycled from previous movies. The Lion King was the first Disney animated movie with an original story (and even then people say it was plagiarized from Kimba).
As for TV shows and made-for-streaming, do you exclude this from Hollywood? It is increasingly the same talent writing producing and acting, so it is more a question of format and distribution.
AAA is more like the old Hollywood "cast of thousands" films, like Ben Hur. You need a lot of people, but no individual contribution stands out. The overall look is determined by the art director: so you need only a few experts at the top.
I'd apply it to an old B&W film to show off. Imagine Ben Hur or Citizen Kane in color!
He didn't say anything about 4 or 0 stars in his review.
> I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-human-centipede-2010
I haven't read most of Ebert's reviews, but I would be quite surprised to read a 4-star review in which he clearly expresses that he didn't like the movie. Maybe Ebert is not typical of connoisseurs? He did say that giving 4 stars to Superman is not the same as giving 4 stars to Ben Hur (or something similar), but he still liked both of them.
I assume you're a connoisseur of something. Pick two things that you dislike, one that is good, one that is bad. Do you dislike them equally?
I won't say that movies with huge fiery explosions are always boring, but there's a pretty strong correlation.
Sometimes, spectacle is worthwhile, such as in Ben Hur, but BH didn't omit the plot.
But I look for movies like Memento, Primer and The Man From Earth, which are entirely plot driven.
I just have no interest anymore in jump scares and explosions.