When we first see the Roman galleys, the camera shows us just one of them at first, and lingers long enough for us to notice that it is a full size functioning ship with crewmen swarming all over it.
When you first see the vast Hippodrome, it always amazes no one expects it to be THAT big.
MGM spent an enormous amount of money on it, and every nickel shows on the screen. There isn't much profundity here, but it's silent film making at its epic best. A word of commendation is also in order for Ted Turner, whose video edition features all the original technicolor inserts and a terrific score by Carl Davis. I urgently recommend to all interested parties the chapter on Ben-Hur in Kevin Brownlow's classic book "The Parade's Gone By" the story of its making is as amazing, as epic and as unlikely as the story told by the film itself.
Niblo was a great action director, and he had the help of assistant director Breezy Eason for the chariot race itself. The best thing in the 1959 remake is the chariot race, which was copied almost shot for shot from the Fred Niblo original. The effects work is markedly better in this version than in 1959 the naval battle is clearly being fought from full size battleships (except for a couple of obvious long model shots), while the remake's parallel scene appears to have been staged in a bathtub. Frank Currer as the senior Arrius and Nigel DeBrulier as Simonides are both superb and special praise is in order for veteran Claire McDowell, who is immensely moving as Ben-Hur's mother watch her in the exterior night scene where she sees her son for the first time in many years but cannot approach him because of her leprosy she is a character straight from Greek tragedy. Carmel Myers, the gorgeous orthodox rabbi's daughter, is a very nice Iras, a character omitted from the 1959 movie altogether. Bushman and Novarro are both very buff, too, for those who notice such things Bushman was once a sculptor's model. Bushman is a brutal and unsubtle Messala, but that is appropriate to the character. Ramon Novarro is appealing and believable in the title part May McAvoy is also appealing, though not very believable. Boyd and Heston are the only ones who emerge with any credit, and the less said about the others the better (excepting Finlay Currie, who can do no wrong). True, the acting style is remote, old-fashioned and somewhat operatic, and the domestic scenes have some longeurs but then the style of acting in the remake is mostly just plain bad. It covers more plot material in 140 minutes than the remake manages to get through in 212. There is no way around it Ben-Hur 1925 is a vastly superior picture to Ben-Hur 1959.
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