"BEN HUR”

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19734, 31 December 1926, Page 15 (Supplement)

"BEN HUR”

FILM THAT HAS COST £1,000,000 BIG CHARIOT RACE SPECTACLE Tho film based on Lew Wallace’s “Ben Hur” had become almost a myth until last month, when it was actually exhibited at the Tivoli Theatre, London. The picture has taken three years to make and unmake. Part of it was done in Rome and part in California. Directors and players have had to be replaced. Finally, it has cost considerably over £1,000,000. Everyone connected with the film trade, metaphorically, has lifted his hat in speaking of “Beu Hur.” It represents all that American money and ingenuity cun achieve in the making of a film. Apart altogether from the street scenes in Palestine—streets crammed with fanatical Jews, brutal Roman soldiers (were they so very brutal, 1 wonder), camels, caravans and flocks and herds—there arc two wonderful spectacles either of which would make the fortune of any film. A Sea Fight The first is a tight between a fleet of pirates and Roman Triremes. These vessels, with their three tiers of oars, were built to an exact classical model in the shipyards of Genoa. We see the galley slaves at their oars with the “hortator” marking time for the stroke with wooden mallets. Quite how the galley slaves managed to pull their weight without purchase for their feet I do not know. The pirates crash into the Roman galleys, splintering their oars like so many matches. Never has there been such hand-to-hand fighting in any film. That is one of the spectacles. The other is the celebrated chariot race. It is celebrated bcause the world has heard much about it for some time, and it was the principal scene in the stage play. The race is a most thrilling affair, .and it has the human interest- of being the means by which Judah the son of Hur is avenged on the Roman Messala. It was not dear why Messala had turned on Bon Hur. Both men had been friends.

However, the story does not really matter in the film. It loses all verisimilitude by tho very film-starlike women. There is no attempt at an Eastern atmosphere in the presentation oi tho principal characters. There never has been such an exciting chariot race in a film. A Triumph of Film Art The Circus Maximus was built to hold 80,000 spectators, and the track is broad enough to enable 12 chariots, each with four horses, to start abreast. All kinus of shots have been taken of rhe race: some of them from the air. and some, apparently from a pit. No less than 42 cameras formed the kinematagraphie battery. The director, Fred. Niblo, worked from a tower 100 feet high, and controlled his army with loudspeakers, telephones and army flag signalling. From the spectator’s point of view the race was worth the trouble. It is more exciting than a Cup final or the Varsity Rugger match, and leaves any horse-race beaten to a frazzle. This is not merely a question of the bigness of the setting, the crowds, and so forth. The race itself is a triumph of kincmatographic art. It was interesting to note. too. that here were bookmakers in Judea In those -lays Their clumsy wax tablets must have Loen very inconvenient, and easily broken or lost if necessary. All the bookmakers were Jews. I wish it were possible to write that the film as a whole is a kinematographie triumph. Religious Pictures Apart from the spectacular the story is poor stuff .and the attempt to bear it up with the birth and death of Christ has been done very clumsily. There is nothing irreverent in the pictures of Joseph and Mary, of the birth of Christ and the adoration, of the Last Supper and of the procession to Calvary. Christ is never wholly seen, but His Presence is suggested. But the religious side of the film is very commonplace in conception, and quite unnecessary. All that it establishes is that Christ’s mission was one of peace and not of war, as Ben Hur thinks. The young man spends all his gains in the race in raising a legion to put the Messiah on a temporal throne. Ramon Novarro as Bon Hur and Francis X. Bushman as Messala are the best of the actors. May McAvoy as a slave girl is straight from Hollywood. and Betty Bronson’s Madonna is much too self-conscious. The big Fox attraction, “Fig Leaves.” has its New Zealand premier at the Regent Theatre, Wellington. on Friday. This attraction, which is tho first of the Fox 1927 products, has been eagerly waited by picture fans, and it is confidently anticipated that the business at the Regent during the screening ©f “Fig Leaves” will be phenomenal.