A film review: Ben Hur

The film “Ben Hur” is a few years old but I still like it as much as when I saw for the first time being a child.

This film was directed by William Wyler and is based on the novel of the same name written by Lewis Wallace. Its main star is Charlton Heston. Other names in the cast are Stephen Boyd and Jack Hawkins.



“Ben Hur” was filmed at Cinecitta Studios in Rome and in the Arizona desert. More than ten thousand extras took part in it. It had the biggest budget which no film had before. It lasts for three hours. The soundtrack is due to Miklos Rozsa; it lasts two hours and half, so it is the longest in the history of cinema.

The story is set in Palestine in the first century. It is about the confrontation between two men, a Jew and a Roman, old friends. Friendship is destroyed by the feeling of belonging to a people and gives way to revenge. The intervention of the character of Jesus Christ puts a counterpoint for forgiveness to the story.



On the other hand, the most famous scene is the chariot race. It takes about ten minutes and is the best that has been done in cinema. Many years later, the movie "Star Wars" made a tribute to that scene.

To sum up, “Ben Hur” won eleven Oscars awards, number equaled only by the movie "Titanic" forty years later. “Ben Hur” is considered one of the best films in the history of cinema.