For Christmas my sweetie-wife gave me a copy of the 50th Anniversary Edition of Ben-Hur on Blu-ray. We spent several evening going through the three documentaries associated with the set (lovely bonus material) be diving into the epic film. (For those not in the know, Ben-Hur an example of massive movie making from the Studio System is better then three hours long.)
The full title is Ben-Hur: A Tale of The Christ and given that title it is as you would expect set in and about the purported time of Christ in the Roman Empire. Christ however is not the main character, though he a central character and event in the film. The Film is about Juda Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) a prince of the Hebrew, a rich merchant and land-owner in Judea under the Romans. Ben-Hur’s boyhood best friend forever, Massala (Stephen Boyd) A Roman has returned as Tribune to the new governor. Times are not good for Judea, rebellion is in the air and the Romans do not tolerate rebellion. Clumsily trying to enlist Ben-Hur against the Jewish rebels, Massala turns Ben-Hur into an enemy and on a flase pretext, arrests Ben-Hur for attempting to murder the new Governor.
What follows is a story of loss, enslavement, revenge, love, and in the end, redemption. The film was shot in MGM 65, a big format wide-screen process developed for films of epic scope and nothing says epic better than this movie.
The blu-ray is from a fully restored print that has been carefully transferred. I have never seen Ben-Hur projected, but I can say that this presentation is stunningly beautiful. The colors are sharp and vibrant, the blacks are deep, the sounds wonderful (Thought for my sweetie-wife’s sake the sub-woofer was off, I suspect the chariot race would have blown us out of our seats.) and the clarity unrivaled. This is exactly the sort of the thing that can be achieved with blu-ray, but all too often is not due to budgeting in the transfer.
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The problem is the scale of the release. Even here in Sna Diego unless there is an event pushing it, we won’t see these classic movies on the big scree, but in Los Angeles that is a different story.
If you or I lived in L.A. or New York we’d have more chances to see classics on the big screen.
I wish the studios would consider a re-release to theaters for this and other similar films. They are re-releasing “Titanic” and “Beauty and the Beast” (Disney, animated) as an IMAX 3-D. I could not care less about 3-D, since it usually gives me a headache and I avoid them but I look forward to seeing it in a theater again. The same is true with this film. I would LOVE to see it in a theater, as it is meant to be seen, where I can’t control the sound and turn it down and the film will overwhelm me, as it was meant to do.