Word: ben-hur
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Have just read your impressive write-up on MGM's great epic Ben-Hur [Nov. 30], but could not help wondering why no mention was made of Miss Haya Harareet, Israel's talented up-and-coming star, who has made her first appearance in a U.S.-made film as Esther in that movie...
...Ben-Hur. Director William Wyler's $15 million film version of Major General Lew Wallace's Biblical bestseller (1880) is not only the most expensive screen spectacle ever produced but also the best...
...Ben-Hur, 1959, by MGM's statistics, is adorned with more than 400 speaking parts, about 10,000 extras, 100,000 costumes, at least 300 sets. One of them, the circus built for the chariot race in Rome's Cinecitta, was the largest ever made for any movie. It covered 18 acres, held 10,000 people and 40,000 tons of sand, took a year to complete, and cost $1,000,000. The race itself, which runs only nine minutes on the screen, ran three months before the cameras and cost another million. Three months before the shooting...
...this sea of celluloid, a masterful director, William (Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives') Wyler, has fished a whale of a picture, the biggest and the best of Hollywood's super-spectacles. The story of Ben-Hur is reasonably faithful to the general's stirring "Tale of the Christ." Prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a rich Jew born about the same time as Christ, falls out with his childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd), commander of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, who demands that Ben-Hur inform against other Jewish patriots. When Ben-Hur refuses...
...that his percentage-of-profits deal with M-G-M will put him on easy street for the rest of his life. But it is probable that MGM, which was in a shaky financial spot when the project was launched, will not have any trouble keeping up the payments. Ben-Hur has run up the biggest advance sale ($500,000) in film history, and the studio expects it to run at least two years at high-priced, ten-a-week showings in selected theaters, and to make more money than The Ten Commandments, which has already grossed more than...