Word: ben-hur
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...employs an extra-wide widescreen, a special color process, 7,000 extras, 10,000 costumes, 35 ships, 50 outsize engines of medieval war, and four of the noblest old castles in Spain: Ampudia, Belmonte, Peñiscola and Torrelobaton. Surprisingly, the picture is good-maybe not as good as Ben-Hur, but anyway better than any spectacle since Spartacus (TIME...
...barefoot" or "riding hour after hour in a chariot in the vicinity of Rome." But many of the films cited by the complaining unions "couldn't have been made at all if they had not been made abroad." In fact, the runaways were helping Hollywood stay in business. Ben-Hur, he argued, saved M-G-M from bankruptcy. But if it had been made in Hollywood, it would have cost prohibitively more than the $14.5 million it cost to make in Rome...
...movie market is between the ages of 12 and 26. He decided that he should gear his films for the "weekly market"--not for the people "who decided to go to a movie once every three months, study the listings very carefully, and then go to something like Ben-Hur." Then he "took three steps backward, and analyzed. Some of the biggest pictures were horror classics; I added the teenage element for today's audience. Now it's tough for me to shake the kick...
...Assisi was roughest of all on the animals. While Curtiz eliminated the sermon to the birds as "too corny," Dillman was still required to bless a menagerie ranging from dogs to ducks. And in the closing minutes of the film-shot in Rome on golden sand previously hallowed by Ben-Hur's chariot tracks -the director decided to foreshadow Francis' death by depicting a raven on a desolate limb. Explained a Curtiz assistant: "We had three ravens in Assisi; one died of cold, and another flew the coop. Some body shut a car door on the last...
When I was a cub reporter, 65 years ago, I was taught that there never had been but two outstanding jobs of reporting: 1) Lew Wallace's account of the Ben-Hur chariot race (fictional); 2) Lafcadio Hearn's account of the Gas House [Tannery] Murder in the Cincinnati Enquirer...