Word: ben-hur
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DIED. William Wyler, 79, film director and three-time Oscar winner, for Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Ben-Hur (1959); of a heart attack; in Beverly Hills, Calif. Born in French Alsace, Wyler immigrated to New York at age 19 and worked as a publicity agent and a script clerk before directing his first silent film in 1925. Though his work ranged from musicals (Funny Girl, 1968) to westerns (The Big Country, 1958), Wyler was best known for his film adaptations of such novels as Sinclair Lewis' Dodsworth (1936) and Emily Bronte...
...edition of his works, and the stitching between these set pieces and interpolated transitions is often loose. Little matter. The story is fascinating, whatever Greene says, and spiced with ir resistible anecdotes. Producer Sam Zimbalist once asked Greene to revise the end of a script for a remake of Ben-Hur: "You see, we find a kind of anticlimax after the Crucifixion." There was the tune the author was sued for libel by Shirley Temple; Greene recalls, "I had suggested that she had a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men." And the time he was deported from...
When Cecil B. DeMille undertook to portray Jesus in his 1927 film King of Kings, he established a style of reverential spectacle that endured for decades in such religious pageants as Ben-Hur, The Robe, the remake of King of Kings, and The Greatest Story Ever Told. In recent years the interpretations have become broader. Jesus was a fierce champion of the oppressed in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, a crucified clown in Godspell, a befuddled mystic in Jesus Christ Superstar, a well-intentioned charlatan in The Passover Plot. A Danish producer is even trying to turn...
...television today. Armies of Roman unemployed, living on a dole from the state, were diverted by athletic contests and theatrical spectacles. At the Colosseum, some 50,000 watched gladiators in combat with wild beasts. In the Circus Maximus, 260,000 cheered on charioteers as they raced in perilous Ben-Hur style. To supply those circuses, hunters fanned through the empire, caging behemoths and great wild cats. So many animals were rounded up that even then there were endangered species: the hippopotamus was made extinct in Nubia, the lion in Mesopotamia, the elephant in North Africa. Sport was the adult...
...many of them. Meanwhile, as Kerkorian's agent of austerity, Aubrey slashed employment from 6,200 to 1,200 and recently began shifting film production from the silver screen to network television series. Aubrey also sold off MGM properties including its record division, studio real estate, theaters-even Ben-Hur's chariot at a much-publicized prop auction. In September he announced that MGM would withdraw from the film distribution business, cut its feature-film production from 18 a year to six or fewer, and concentrate on such "leisure-time" ventures as the Grand Hotel, the firm...