God, Mammon and Imperial Entanglements… April 9, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, Historical Drama , trackbackHaving no faith whatsoever myself, it’s perhaps a little odd that I feel almost morally obliged to watch at least one Hollywood Biblical epic during the Easter holiday; it harks back to my youth when all television had to offer at this time of year was a good dose of God to go alongside the ‘Pace Egging’ and ‘Walking Day’ processions. God and Mammon in fact.
Now, it seems, there’s not much room for the Resurrection; we have to make do with Mammon alone…and the nearest that any of the Trinity gets to being broadcast into my living room is when a golfer in Augusta tells me how Jesus helped him with that particularly difficult chip at the 17th.
The Lord truly does move in mysterious ways.
With The Prophet reduced to the status of a bag-toting caddy, I slap Warners DVD of Ben-Hur into my player, and, as per usual, right up to and including the quite magnificent chariot race*, I’m royally entertained. Thereafter, William Wyler’s 1959 epic runs out of steam as the narrative slows to a crawl, and we have to rely on the rather dull ’fairy tale’ element of the saga to hold our interest. Part of the problem is that Judah’s mother and sister seem no more ravaged by the horrors of leprosy than your average acne scarred teenager (’Lepers! See - they have zits too!’), and over-exposure to The Life of Brian means that these days, with the Sermon on The Mount and the stoning of the prostitute, my brain screams ‘blessed are the cheesemakers?’ and ‘Who threw that!? I’m warning you…’
But until the moment the evil ‘Messala’ spits at ‘Judah’ that the ‘race goes on’, Ben-Hur remains a fascinating piece of film-making. Wyler famously asked Gore Vidal and Christopher Fry to doctor his script and despite the protestations of Charlton Heston, the conclusion that they inserted a not so subtle homosexual subtext into the material is inescapable.
It’s there when Juda and Messala first meet with a lovers embrace, tears of joy in their eyes, and the sharing of wine, their arms sensuously entwined. It’s there too as ’Quintus Arrius’ casts his eye lasciviously over the near naked Judah, the forlorn Prince chained to his oar, his hate-filled eyes setting the agitated, lip-smacking Consul’s juices flowing.
Quintus Arrius: Your eyes are full of hate, forty-one. That’s good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength.
Now, all that has been the subject of debate after debate and you could just as easily argue that Judah and Messala are simply, ah, very good friends and that Arrius is moved to help Judah by God’s will rather than a stirring ‘neath his tunica talaris (or both). You could, honest.
Oh, perhaps not…
But even more intriguing, given today’s Middle Eastern turmoil, is the script’s anti-imperialist sentiments which must surely also have sprung from the acid dipped nib of Vidal.
Ben-Hur hit the screens just three years after the Suez Crisis, and political intrigue in the Middle East was very much to the fore. Britain, France and America, aided by the embattled Israelis, were seen to be meddling in a part of the world that has long been been a quite volatile powder keg, indeed it was a decade in which liberal America was horrified by their country’s role as ‘world policeman’, and what was seen by some as the USA’s imperial ambitions. Plus ca change…
Of course, General Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ simply follows the scriptures when he has Imperial Rome as the hated conquerers of The Holy Lands. The masters contempt for non-Romans extends to casual beatings, the indigenous population subject to being routinely gaoled in lightless hell holes without just cause or trial (which ironically foreshadows modern events), the populace taxed into abject poverty.
However, the finished film script is peppered with lines which echo down the decades. As Messala takes up his new post he’s told: “…the people have an irrational resentment of Roman…then there’s religion, they smash the statues of our Gods…”, which mirrors a continuing western conceit that freedom and contentment can only be measured by our standards, our insistence on foisting our ideas of ‘democracy’ on people and considering it all they need to become ‘civilised’.
Moreover Messala is told that ‘there’s always some rabble rouser ready to stir up the people…You can break a man’s skull, you can arrest him, you can throw him into a dungeon. But how do you control what’s up here? How do you fight an idea?’ It’s a continuing conundrum.
Messala is the black-hearted cheerleader for the ‘Masters of the World’. He tells Judah: ‘There is rebellion in the wind; it will be crushed. It’s a Roman world if you want to live in it you have to become part of it...it was no accident that one small village on the Tiber was chosen to rule the world.’
Judah Ben-Hur: ‘Your legions..?’
Messala: ‘No, it wasn’t just our legions. Other countries have armies, fine armies, I know I’ve fought them. It was fate that chose us to civilise the world and we have. Our ships connect every corner of the earth, Roman law, Roman literature are the glory of the human race.
‘…Resistance to Rome is futile it can only end one way. Extinction for your people.’
Later comes the pivotal exchange. Messala is begging his childhood friend, The Prince of Hur, to act as his informer. ‘The Emperor is watching us, at this moment he is watching the east. The Emperor is watching us - all we need to do is serve him.’
Judah: ‘You talk of him as if he were a God…’
Messala: ‘He is a God! Real power on earth! …There is only one reality in the world today…Look to the West, Judah! Don’t be a fool, look to Rome!
Judah: I would rather be a fool than a traitor… or a killer!
Messala: I am a soldier!
Judah: Yes! Who kills! For Rome! Rome is evil!
Messala: I warn you…
Judah: No! I warn YOU! Rome is an affront to God! Rome is strangling my people and my country, the whole Earth! But not forever. I tell you the day Rome falls there will be a shout of freedom such as the world has never heard before!
That last exchange of dialogue in particular is breath-taking. It’s a climactic moment in the film, it seals the fate of Judah Ben-Hur, but, speculatively perhaps, it’s also further evidence, nearly half a century ago, of the frustration of the anti-imperialist scourge that is Gore Vidal, a man that only recently wrote that Americans were ‘now governed by a junta of Oil–Pentagon men… both Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and so on.’
At the end of course, Judah embraces the teachings of the Nazarian and eschews violence as a means of ridding his people of their hated conquerors. A happy conclusion then, and proof positive, surely, of the good that lies within all people; it’s a fair bet the perceptive Vidal didn’t write that…
*George Lucas paid another of his filmic ’homages’ (aka ’see a good idea, steal it’) in The Phantom Menace with his ‘pod race’ sequence, John Williams doing his professional damnedest to imitate Miklós Rózsa’s magnificent score for that scene. If anyone had any doubt that pixels could replace the adrenalin rush provided by real action performed by real daredevil flesh and blood stuntmen, look no further.
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Same here at Easter - somehow the Bank holiday isn’t complete without a biblical epic. Went for the ‘56 “The Ten Commandments” this year; good as it was, not a patch on “Ben-Hur”, which remains in my book the greatest “epic” (if that’s a genre) ever made. The chariot race itself just amazes me every time I watch, knowing that they did it all for real, no computers, and it walks all over anything similar filmed today.
Well they didn’t do it all for real did they. The mock up backgrounds, painted backgrounds, toy galleys,Victory parade repeat background of endless soldiers but no, ‘No computers”.