Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (MGM, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Harvey on Easter Sunday, April 20, my husband Charles and I watched the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of one of my favorite movies, the 1925 silent version of Ben-Hur. Originally released as Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, this story began in 1880 when former U.S. Civil War General Lew Wallace published it as a novel. In 1899 it was adapted as a play and became a huge stage success for a theatrical syndicate called Klaw and Erlanger, but the problem was that it could only play in cities with theatres large enough for the treadmill equipment needed to stage the story’s famous chariot race. One reviewer of the play version said the chariot race could only be staged “with Mr. Edison’s invention,” and in 1907 the Kalem Company decided to do just that: make a 15-minute cut-down version of Ben-Hur centered around the chariot race. Alas, they were sued by Wallace’s heirs (and probably the Klaw and Erlanger company as well) for copyright infringement, and in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the courts ruled that intellectual property laws applied to films and you couldn’t just go ahead and film a copyrighted story without negotiating and paying for the rights to do so. In 1922 the Goldwyn Corporation was in that weird two-year nether period between corporate raider Pat Powers’s successful ouster of Sam Goldwyn from the company he had founded and named after himself (actually Goldwyn the corporation came before Goldwyn the person: he’d formed “Goldwyn” as a mash-up of his own name, Samuel Goldfish – which he got from a typical Ellis Island screw-up in which a clerk wrote down his original name, “Schmuel Gelbfisz,” as “Samuel Goldfish” – with that of his partners, brothers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn, and then he decided to take “Goldwyn” as his own name as well because it sounded less silly than “Goldfish”) and the company’s absorption into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1924.

The Goldwyn Corporation put a movie version of Ben-Hur into production in 1922 and originally offered it to Erich von Stroheim to direct, but he turned it down in favor of Frank Norris’s McTeague, which he filmed as Greed (1924). They finally hired Charles Brabin as director and sent a crew to Italy to make the movie there, even though, as Gary Carey pointed out in his book on MGM, “none of Ben-Hur’s Rome then existed except as ruins.” Originally they cast a nondescript actor named George Walsh (younger brother of actor and, eventually, director Raoul Walsh) as Judah Ben-Hur and Francis X. Bushman as Ben-Hur’s friend turned bitter enemy and rival, the Roman officer Messala. Then Goldwyn was absorbed into MGM and the people now in charge, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, looked at the rushes and were horrified at the amount of time and money being spent on a film that was at best mediocre and at worst unreleasable. So they called off the production and decided to shoot Ben-Hur in Hollywood, with Fred Niblo replacing Brabin as director and Ramon Novarro taking over as Ben-Hur. They built a huge replica of a Roman chariot track (though one thing I’d forgotten about this movie was that the chariot race takes place not in Rome itself, but in Antioch), and a work crew from Culver City, where the MGM studio was located, suddenly showed up one afternoon, jackhammers at the ready, to tear it up so they could repair a sewer line underneath. I’d seen the 1925 Ben-Hur before with Charles from a videotape I’d made off a previous TCM showing, and I was quite impressed with it then – and I still am, even though there were a few things I misremembered about the film.

The version we were watching was a 1987 reissue print prepared by Thames Television (the main commercial channel on British TV) and Ted Turner’s company (Turner had bought the rights to the entire MGM, Warner Bros. and RKO film libraries to feed his super-cable channel, and they all ended up back at Warners when Turner merged his company into Warner Bros.), featuring a musical score by Carl Davis that, among other things, made liberal use of the “Dresden Amen,” the traditional Saxon hymn quoted by Mendelssohn in his “Reformation” Symphony and Wagner in his last opera, Parsifal. (I can readily imagine Carl Davis thinking, “Well, if it’s good enough for Mendelssohn and Wagner, it’s good enough for me.”) The “Dresden Amen” became a Leitmotif for Jesus Christ and the bits of his life that interface with Ben-Hur’s. One of the things I had thought about the film was that its multiple sequences in two-strip Technicolor only depicted events in Jesus’s life, but there was one big scene in two-strip that didn’t involve Jesus. It took place in Rome, after Judah Ben-Hur (to use his full name) has become the star athlete of the Roman Empire and is being fêted in the streets of the city and given the ancient Roman version of a ticker-tape parade. Charles made the interesting comment that Novarro was one of the few actors of his generation who actually got filmed in color – and in 1934, nine years after Ben-Hur, Novarro would appear with Jeanette MacDonald in The Cat and the Fiddle, whose last reel was shot in three-strip Technicolor: the first time that process was used in a live-action film.

I remember quite liking the 1925 Ben-Hur and finding it a much better movie than the far more famous 1959 remake, and one of the things I liked about it was that Ramon Novarro seemed much better casting for Ben-Hur than Charlton Heston had in the remake. Ben-Hur is a character who for all his action cred is far more someone to whom things happen than someone who makes things happen. He first gets in trouble when the new Roman governor Valerius Gratus (played by an actor not identified on imdb.com but who looks like the beta version of Charles Laughton in the one scene we get to see him in) arrives in Jerusalem and announces a kick-ass policy to suppress even the hint of anti-Roman dissent among the Jewish population. Gratus is staging a triumphal parade down the streets of Jerusalem to show those pesky Jews who’s boss, and Ben-Hur and his remaining family – his mother Miriam (Claire McDowell) and sister Tirzah (Kathleen Key) – are watching from the balcony of their palatial home. (It’s already been established that the Hur family is one of the few genuinely rich ones in the Jewish community of Jerusalem.) As the Hurs are watching the big parade, Ben-Hur accidentally loosens a piece of masonry and it falls on Gratus, killing him. Ben-Hur’s boyhood friend, the Roman Messala (Francis X. Bushman, who’d been a major star at Essanay Studios in the 1910’s, had fallen in popularity and was hoping playing Messala in Ben-Hur would be a major comeback role), condemns him to life as a galley slave as punishment. Ben-Hur is being marched through the desert to his new fate when he and the Roman soldiers who are in charge of him and the other Jewish slaves – one of whom faints from exhaustion and is left behind in the desert to die – are denied water, though when they’re passing through Nazareth the son of a local carpenter takes Ben-Hur aside and gives him water. Then Ben-Hur suffers as a galley slave for the next 20 minutes or so until he ends up on a ship commanded by Roman bigwig Quintus Arrius (Frank Currier).

The ship is attacked by pirates who have twice as many ships in their fleet as the Romans do, and the pirates’ rams sink most of the Roman ships and kill most of the galley slaves – they were literally chained to their posts – but Ben-Hur escapes because Arrius had ordered him unchained because he liked Ben-Hur’s spirit. “You talk like a Roman,” Arrius tells him. Ultimately they’re shipwrecked and spend two days drifting on the ocean surface clinging to a piece of their former ship, until they spot a Roman vessel which rescues them. At first Arrius tells Ben-Hur to let him die because his debacle at the hands of the pirates has convinced him he has no right to live, but Ben-Hur won’t let Arrius drown. When the two are finally rescued, Arrius is acclaimed as a hero and the two go to Rome, where Ben-Hur becomes a major chariot-racing star. All goes well until Ben-Hur receives word that his old retainer and literal slave Simonides (Nigel de Brulier) managed to preserve the Hur fortune and use it to establish himself as a major merchant in Antioch. Ben-Hur, who in the meantime has become Arrius’s adopted son, is given permission to go to Antioch, where he meets Simonides and also reunites with his former girlfriend, Simonides’s daughter Esther (May McAvoy, one year before she would be Al Jolson’s leading lady in The Jazz Singer, the film that would essentially do in the silent era). The big thing Ben-Hur wants to know is where his mother and daughter are; we know, though he does not, that they’re being held prisoner in one of the many dungeons the Romans have built under Jerusalem. When Sheik Ilderim (Mitchell Lewis) loses his chariot driver on the eve of a big race, he tries to recruit Ben-Hur to take his place. Ben-Hur refuses until he learns that his friend turned enemy Messala is another one of the contestants, whereupon he agrees to drive as long as he’s billed merely as “The Unknown Jew.”

The night before the Big Race, Messala assigns his vampy girlfriend Iras (Carmel Myers), to seduce Ben-Hur and find out who he really is. She does her damnedest, but she’s so angry at him for not responding to her that she gives him a parting insult that Messala could drive a team of snails and still beat him. (Given that in real life Ramon Novarro was Gay, I couldn’t help but joke that if Messala had sent him the cute little slave boy clad only in shorts we’d seen earlier in the scene, that might have worked as intended.) The race is staged surprisingly similarly to the one in the 1959 remake – it even takes place under a singularly ugly giant statue – perhaps because William Wyler worked as an assistant director on this one and had graduated to full director on the remake. There are just two big differences: in 1959 a big to-do was made over Messala’s use of so-called “Grecian wheels” on his chariot, studded spikes that stuck out of his wheelbase and sliced the other drivers’ chariot wheels to ribbons (in 1925 Messala deliberately fouls one of the other drivers and causes him to crash), and in this version Messala survives the chariot race, though disabled rather than dead. I remember the first time I saw the 1959 Ben-Hur in a 1970’s theatrical re-release with my mother and I was disappointed that the rest of the movie seemed like a big anticlimax after the chariot race. That’s less true of this version as Ben-Hur, determined to avenge himself against the Roman occupiers and convinced that Jesus is the rebel leader the Jews need, stakes his entire fortune on raising two legions to fight a resistance war. Only Jesus refuses Ben-Hur’s offer because His message is about peace and loving one’s enemies, not bloody revolution.

Meanwhile, a new governor, Pontius Pilate, has taken over as the Romans’ on-site ruler in Jerusalem, and he’s mounted a campaign to release all the Jewish prisoners who weren’t already accounted for in the Roman dungeons – only instead of setting them free, he sends them to a leper colony where they’ll get leprosy and die from its effects. Pilate does this to Miriam and Tirzah, and they’re both duly infected until Jesus runs into them literally on the road to his crucifixion and cures them on the spot. The film ends with Jesus crucified but Ben-Hur back with his family insisting that Jesus will live on in the hearts of his followers. The 1925 Ben-Hur is quite an impressive movie, back when “a cast of thousands” literally meant just that – you couldn’t fake the crowd scenes with CGI like you can now – and a number of famous Hollywood people, including Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Joan Crawford, John Gilbert, John and Lionel Barrymore, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Marion Davies, producer Sam Goldwyn and directors Clarence Brown, Henry King, George Fitzmaurice, Rupert Julian and Sidney Franklin emerged as audience extras in the chariot-race scene. I also like the painterly elegance of the two-strip Technicolor scenes, especially the ones in which Jesus appears – though one thing I don’t like about the movie is the almost strip tease-ish way the character of Jesus is handled. While previous Jesus films including the 1903 French film The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ and the 1912 From the Manger to the Cross, had actually shown Christ full-figure on screen, for Ben-Hur MGM’s “suits” decided that having an actor play Jesus visibly would be considered sacrilegious by Christian audiences. (Fortunately, within two years Cecil B. DeMille would redress that particular bit of Hollywood grievance and make a full-blown biopic of Jesus, The King of Kings, which showed H. B. Warner full-figure as Jesus and was an enormous hit.) Ben-Hur was a committee-made film, though it doesn’t look like one – Carey Wilson and Bess Meredyth wrote the version shot in Rome but June Mathis rewrote it and did the Hollywood version – and it’s so beautifully balanced between faith and drama (as the 1959 version really wasn’t) it still packs a punch as both pro-Christian propaganda and excellent entertainment.