Free William Wyler by Gabriel Miller Page B

featuring a chariot race staged by the Brooklyn Fire Department. MGM released a hugely successful version in 1925 at a cost of $4 million; it starred Ramon Novarro as Ben-Hur and Francis X. Bushman as Messala, and it was directed by Fred Niblo. This, too, was an enormous success, although its run was cut short by the advent of sound. Wyler's version would match its predecessors’ success, being nominated for twelve Academy Awards and winning eleven (a record at the time), including Best Picture and Best Director (Wyler's third). Its financial success was so great that it temporarily saved MGM from bankruptcy and revolutionized the industry by spawning countless big-budget films.
    Wyler's film alters Wallace's narrative in some important ways. In the novel, the Judah-Messala relationship receives only cursory attention, for Wallace is more interested in Judah's relationship to Christ. Wyler underplays that theme, however, making the relationship between the former friends central to the story, even though they do not interact during a significant portion of the film. In concentrating on this relationship, Wyler elicits some fine acting from Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd (neither of them known as very expressive actors), vividly evoking their initial affection, which eventually turns to hate. Indeed, the emotional nature of their disagreement and estrangement dominates the opening movements so powerfully that it hangs over the film until the end.
    Gore Vidal, who claims to have written much of the first half of the film, suggested to Wyler: “Could it be that the two had some sort of emotional relationship the first time ‘round, and now the Roman wants to start up again? Ben-Hur doesn't—and doesn't get the point?”
    â€œGore,” Wyler said, “this is Ben-Hur . You can't do that.”
    â€œIf you don't do something like that you won't even have Ben-Hur,” he retorted. “You'll have a motiveless mess on your hands.”
    â€œWell, you can't be overt,” Wyler cautioned.
    â€œI'm not going to be overt. There won't be one line. But I can write it in such a way that the audience is going to feel that there is something emotional between these two, which is not stated and which blows the fuse in Messala. He's spurned, so it's a love scene gone wrong.” 33
    In later years, Wyler would claim that he did not remember having that conversation, but the relationship seems too charged, and Messala's reaction to Judah's turning him down too extreme, for a mere political disagreement. Wyler's framing of the reunion scene between the boyhood friends—clearly echoing the postwar reunion of Al and Milly Stephenson in The Best Years of Our Lives —confirms that he took Vidal's suggestion seriously, without being “overt.” Judah is introduced in deep focus, framed in a doorway with crossbeams above it in the shape of a cross, thus anticipating both Judah's fate at the hands of Messala and his presumed conversion. At first, Judah is barely visible because Messala, his back to the camera, occupies the front of the frame. Once they catch sight of each other, the two men pause, then walk toward each other, meeting roughly in the center of the frame, and embrace. The sequence is filmed without a cut.
    The intransigence of their subsequent hostility is similar to that of the Terrills and the Hannasseys, but in this film, the motivations transcend simple hatred. The psychological complexity of the characters—an element that is sorely missing from The Big Country —feeds the intensity of their conflict, which, like the feud in the earlier film, severely tests Judah's antipathy to violence. Indeed, at one point, he prays, “May God grant me vengeance.” The famed chariot race—the film's centerpiece—is, in effect, a variation of hand-to-hand combat, an alternative version of the confrontation between the Major and Rufus in Blanco Canyon. As Messala says to