Word: ben-hur
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mexican army, a minister to Turkey, the organizer of an insurance company, a fortune-hunter, a hero. He was ruined by the Battle of Shiloh and again by postwar politics; ruined again by an attempt to organize a Mexican army. But after all his misfortunes, he wrote Ben-Hur which, both as a novel and as a play, and later as a movie, exercised a genuinely magnetic hold over the American imagination...
Lamplit Target. The excitement, color, and fighting of Ben-Hur, though set in the Rome of the early Christian martyrs, came out of Wallace's own vivid experience, says Biographer McKee. He had been stimulated to think out his own religious convictions to answer the century's famed atheist, Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll. It took him seven years to write the novel. When three-quarters of the book was finished, he was recalled to New Mexico. Wallace worked on Ben-Hur in the governor's mansion at Santa Fe, an old building with grime-covered walls, rain...
...Ben-Hur earned Wallace only $300 in the first seven months. But nine years later, in 1889, 400,000 copies had been sold. In 1913, Sears Roebuck ordered a million copies. Just before the play was produced, Charles Frohman said to Producers Klaw & Erlanger: "Boys, I'm afraid you're up against it-the American public will never stand for Christ and a horse race in the same show." The play ran for 21 years...
...great scenes of the play-the dim, enormous interior of the Roman trireme, the wreck, and the struggles on machine-tossed waves, pale moonlight, the cataclysmic race, with two real chariots, each drawn by four Arabian horses, wheels rumbling and swaying, the incredible collision and Ben-Hur's triumph-all this excited and continued to excite the public...
Except for his 1926 appearance as Messala, Ramon Novarro's competition in the Ben-Hur chariot race, and a brief bit in Wilson, Bushman never appeared on the screen again. But in the last 16 years he has played 2,500 bit parts in just about anything radio had to offer, from Red Ryder to One Man's Family...