There might be some who discount this nearly four-hour epic set as much in Rome and the Mediterranean as the Holy Lands as a Jesus movie. For most, it’s simply remembered for that spectacular chariot race filmed in glorious 65mm and just about the widest possible aspect ratio. But there’s a reason it was the second most successful film ever when released in 1959, and it’s the same as what caused the novel, written by Civil War veteran Lew Wallace, to become the most popular American fiction of the late 19th century. As its subtitle assures us, this is “A Tale of the Christ,” and the first scene of the movie is a silent, painterly recreation of the Christmas story—a feat bookended by a similarly hushed reenactment of the death and implicit resurrection on the other side of the picture.
In between those two sequences, Christ is a figure felt throughout the film but never quite seen. His presence permeates though, elevating the film’s central narrative about one Hebrew prince named Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and his personal rivalry with childhood soulmate turned autocratic oppressor, the Roman tribute Messala (Stephen Boyd), into a reclamation project.
Theirs is the classic revenger’s story extracted from its most adventurous and swashbuckling interpretations, a la Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Despite being best pals in their youth—if not something more according to one of the film’s screenwriter Gore Vidal—Messala cruelly betrays his kindred spirit for advancement in the Roman machine, and Judah is sentenced to die on a galley ship as a slave. Through luck (or providence), he is then spared from a shipwreck and watery grave. He escapes his fate, rises to an unlikely status of renown in the Roman world, and uses it to return home and challenge Messala to what amounts to a climactic chariot race to the death.
It is a story of spurned fraternal love, and through it all the screenplay not so subtly expounds on the emptiness of revenge and how killing Messala will not restore to Judah a sister and mother who were condemned to a leper colony, nor will it fill the void in his soul. Meanwhile, constantly in the margins of his life, there is a strange carpenter with an ethereal draw. He is the empathetic man on the desert road who offers Judah the Slave water when his Roman masters seek only to bask in his dehydrated despair. The same man is there again on a mount outside of Jerusalem when Ben-Hur can only think of his petty personal problems, vacillating between being a wealthy Roman pawn or a penniless Jewish rebel. That figure is also finally at the end of the film in need of Judah’s own help while carrying a cross up a hill.
So yes, it is a story of Christ, but one which has the restraint to only nod toward Christ’s affect on others as opposed to the special effects they might promise. Never once is Jesus’ face seen on the screen, but without doubt this is every American Sunday school’s vision of Jesus. The best religious scene in the movie has been parodied, including quite hilariously by the Coen Brothers, but there is a reason they were still thinking about it 60 years after the fact. In the scene where Jesus gives water to a dying man, the divinity of the Son of God is explicit despite being only inferred.
We see simply a hand holding Judah’s face as he desperately sips from a wooden ladle of water, oblivious to the stranger’s palm cradling the makeshift cup and his head. Only after tasting life again does Ben-Hur look up and recognize something in this man. It’s something a scornful Roman centurion also sees when threatening to whip the carpenter before being startled into lowering his weapon and looking away in shame from Christ’s gaze.
