William Wyler (53 page)

Like many westerns made in the 1950s,
The Big Country
grapples with the notion of negotiating with the enemy rather than engaging in violent confrontation, debated in response to various international conflicts arising during the decade. As in the global political aftermath of World War II, peace on the western frontier would require a spirit of mutual understanding and a desire to forgo violence. This pacifist inclination is clearly reflected in McKay's attempts to avoid violence even in self-defense, as it is in the stubborn Quaker faith of Amy Kane (Grace Kelly) in
High Noon
and
Friendly Persuasion's
Eliza Birdwell. In each of these cases, however, the pacifist position is finally undercut. When faced with an implacable and irreconcilable enemy, the nonviolent position proves untenable. Interestingly,
The Big Country's
most memorable sequences, including Peck and Heston's fight in the moonlight and the final shoot-out in Blanco Canyon, make their own statement about the inevitability of violence in a “pacifist” film.

Wyler would reconsider these questions one more time in what became his most honored film,
Ben-Hur
(1959). Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a Jewish merchant of royal blood, reunites after many years with his close boyhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd). Messala has returned to Judea, where he and Judah grew up, as the newly appointed Roman tribune. It is Messala's job to put down the locals, who are planning to rebel against the Roman occupation. Messala wants Judah to inform on the rebel leaders and persuade the rest of his countrymen that they should simply accept Roman rule. When Messala insists that “you are either for me or against me,” Judah chooses to be “against.” Later, during a procession, a tile from the Hur house is dislodged and hits the Roman governor. Although this was an accident, Messala refuses to intervene, condemning Judah to be a galley slave and imprisoning his mother, Miriam (Martha Scott), and his sister, Tirzah (Cathy O'Donnell). Judah, who earlier described himself as being “against violence,” vows vengeance against his former friend.

The film presents the story of Judah's determination to survive his ordeals and return to Judea to kill Messala. As the original novel's subtitle suggests, it is also “A Tale of the Christ.” Although the latter is only a minor thread of the story, Judah eventually embraces Christ's teaching that “forgiveness is more powerful than hatred.” Wyler pays less attention to this aspect of the plot than the novel does, although the film does end with a stirring re-creation of the crucifixion and a miracle.

Sam Zimbalist, who had produced
Tortilla Flat
and
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo
in the 1940s, headed more extravagant productions in the 1950s, including
King Solomon's Mines
(1950) and another Roman/Christ epic,
Quo Vadis
(1951). He had learned that he could make big-budget films for less money in Rome, and he wanted to economize further by utilizing the sets from
Quo Vadis
for another film set in the same era. Zimbalist spoke to Wyler as early as 1957 about directing a remake of
Ben-Hur
, which had been a huge success for MGM as a silent film in 1925, when Wyler worked as an assistant on the chariot race scene. At first, thinking the producer was joking, Wyler suggested that he take his proposal to Cecil B. DeMille, whose reputation had been built on making epic films. Zimbalist, however, was not interested in the spectacle aspect of the movie: “What we want, what we're interested in, is good intimate stuff. Intimacy is the meat of the story and proportionally, the spectacle, is perhaps, one tenth of the whole film.”
³¹
What Zimbalist wanted was the “Wyler touch”—the sophistication and depth Wyler could bring to the central relationships in the story. And, in fact, Wyler had more success bringing his distinctive flair to
Ben-Hur
than he had with
The Big Country
. Perhaps
Ben-Hur's
more polished style was also due, in part, to his success in getting some better writers to work on Karl Tunberg's original script, including novelist Gore Vidal and playwright Christopher Fry, although neither of them received credit on the released film.
³²

Ultimately, Wyler was attracted to the project because he saw it as a challenge. He had never done an epic film, and he wanted to see if he could make a “DeMille picture.” Perhaps more important, he was offered a great deal of money—$350,000, which, at the time, was the largest fee ever paid to a director. This sum was raised by $100,000 when he took over as producer after Zimbalist suddenly died during filming—plus 8 percent of the gross revenues or 3 percent of the net profits, whichever was greater. The film would eventually gross $76 million worldwide, making Wyler financially secure for the rest of his life.

The novel on which the film was based was a cultural phenomenon. Lew Wallace, a Union general, had begun writing the novel in Indiana after the Civil War and completed it eight years later in New Mexico, where he was the territorial governor. Published in 1880,
Ben-Hur
sold poorly for a few years, but by 1885, it was selling 50,000 copies a year; it would go on to become the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century. Its success on the page was then matched by its triumph on the stage, when it was produced on Broadway in 1899, starring William S. Hart as Messala. Various versions of the original production toured the country for twenty years, and other productions were mounted in London, Paris, Berlin, and as far away as Australia.

In 1907 the Kalem Company brought out the first film version—a fifteen-minute affair featuring a chariot race staged by the Brooklyn Fire Department. MGM released a hugely successful version in 1925 at a cost of $4 million; it starred Ramon Novarro as Ben-Hur and Francis X. Bushman as Messala, and it was directed by Fred Niblo. This, too, was an enormous success, although its run was cut short by the advent of sound. Wyler's version would match its predecessors' success, being nominated for twelve Academy Awards and winning eleven (a record at the time), including Best Picture and Best Director (Wyler's third). Its financial success was so great that it temporarily saved MGM from bankruptcy and revolutionized the industry by spawning countless big-budget films.

Wyler's film alters Wallace's narrative in some important ways. In the novel, the Judah-Messala relationship receives only cursory attention, for Wallace is more interested in Judah's relationship to Christ. Wyler underplays that theme, however, making the relationship between the former friends central to the story, even though they do not interact during a significant portion of the film. In concentrating on this relationship, Wyler elicits some fine acting from Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd (neither of them known as very expressive actors), vividly evoking their initial affection, which eventually turns to hate. Indeed, the emotional nature of their disagreement and estrangement dominates the opening movements so powerfully that it hangs over the film until the end.

Gore Vidal, who claims to have written much of the first half of the film, suggested to Wyler: “Could it be that the two had some sort of emotional relationship the first time ‘round, and now the Roman wants to start up again? Ben-Hur doesn't—and doesn't get the point?”

“Gore,” Wyler said, “this is
Ben-Hur
. You can't do that.”

“If you don't do something like that you won't even have
Ben-Hur,”
he retorted. “You'll have a motiveless mess on your hands.”

“Well, you can't be overt,” Wyler cautioned.

“I'm not going to be overt. There won't be one line. But I can write it in such a way that the audience is going to feel that there is something emotional between these two, which is not stated and which blows the fuse in Messala. He's spurned, so it's a love scene gone wrong.”
³³

In later years, Wyler would claim that he did not remember having that conversation, but the relationship seems too charged, and Messala's reaction to Judah's turning him down too extreme, for a mere political disagreement. Wyler's framing of the reunion scene between the boyhood friends—clearly echoing the postwar reunion of Al and Milly Stephenson in
The Best Years of Our Lives
—confirms that he took Vidal's suggestion seriously, without being “overt.” Judah is introduced in deep focus, framed in a doorway with crossbeams above it in the shape of a cross, thus anticipating both Judah's fate at the hands of Messala and his presumed conversion. At first, Judah is barely visible because Messala, his back to the camera, occupies the front of the frame. Once they catch sight of each other, the two men pause, then walk toward each other, meeting roughly in the center of the frame, and embrace. The sequence is filmed without a cut.

The intransigence of their subsequent hostility is similar to that of the Terrills and the Hannasseys, but in this film, the motivations transcend simple hatred. The psychological complexity of the characters—an element that is sorely missing from
The Big Country
—feeds the intensity of their conflict, which, like the feud in the earlier film, severely tests Judah's antipathy to violence. Indeed, at one point, he prays, “May God grant me vengeance.” The famed chariot race—the film's centerpiece—is, in effect, a variation of hand-to-hand combat, an alternative version of the confrontation between the Major and Rufus in Blanco Canyon. As Messala says to Judah before the race, “This is the day. It is between us now.” While
The Big Country
ends with the death of the two antagonists, the chariot race ends in Messala's death and Judah's eventual redemption. Both films posit that pacifism is antithetical to human nature or, at least, that it violates masculine codes of conduct.
³⁴

The conflict between pacifist ideals and active resistance to oppression resonated with Wyler because of the correspondence between Messala's politics and that of the Nazis. As tribune, he announces, “The emperor is displeased. He wants Judea to be made into a more obedient and disciplined province.” Then he goes on to counsel his friend: “Be wise, Judah. It's a Roman world; if you want to live in it, you must become part of it…. Persuade your people that their resistance to Rome is stupid. It's worse than stupid—futile. For it can end in only one way, extinction for your people.” The ideology behind those words is recognizably Nazi, as signaled in the references to providence, obedience, and extinction. The association is made even more explicit in the following exchange:

M
ESSALA
: In the name of the gods, Judah, what do the lives of a few Jews mean to you?

J
UDAH
: If I cannot persuade them, that does not mean I would help you murder them.

M
ESSALA
: You are a conquered people, you live on dead dreams, you live on myths of the past.

Wyler was an enthusiastic supporter of Israel, and according to Madsen, he donated money to Israeli causes.
³⁵
He certainly knew that in 1956, shortly before he started work on the film, Israel, backed by England and France, had started a war against Egypt in response to its president's nationalizing of the Suez Canal. When President Eisenhower condemned the attack, the troops were withdrawn.

Another dialogue sequence between Messala and Judah obviously resonated with Wyler as well. When the tribune demands that Judah reveal the names of Jewish resistance leaders, he labels them “criminals.” Judah counters by calling them “patriots” and asks, “Would I retain your friendship if I became an informer?” This overt reference to the HUAC hearings compares America, in its attempt to subvert civil liberties, to the Roman Empire.

Though Messala's spirit hovers over the second part of the film, the action is dominated by Judah's love for Esther (Haya Harareet). The couple first meets in one of Wyler's signature staircase scenes: she stands at the top and then descends to meet Judah below. Esther functions as the link between the secular story and the more religious one, since she is the person who leads Judah to Christ. Whereas the novel's Judah comes to Christ more actively—he is the one who listens to Christ's Sermon on the Mount—Wyler's Judah, still bitter about the fate of his sister and mother, walks away from the sermon and hears about it from Esther. It is also through Esther that Judah is eventually reunited with his mother and sister.

In his final scene with Pontius Pilate, Judah rejects the governor's offer to become a Roman citizen. Although he was adopted, earlier in the film, by Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins), an admiral of the Roman fleet whose life he saved, he now asserts that he is not Young Arrius but Judah Ben-Hur. Declaring himself a Jew and not a Roman, he goes on to blame Rome for destroying Messala and turning him into a monster: “I knew him—well—before the cruelty of Rome spread in his blood. Rome destroyed Messala as surely as Rome is destroying my family.” Despite this epiphany, Judah remains consumed with hatred because his mother and sister have become lepers and outcasts. Esther berates him: “Hatred has turned you to stone. It's as though you have become Messala.”

Judah and Esther take Miriam and Tirzah to see Jesus, who, unbeknownst to them, is being led to his crucifixion. During a thunderstorm that signals Jesus's death, Esther leads the women to a cave. The darkness of the cave and the tight framing recall the gloomy, cramped room where Buck tries to rape Julie, as well as the catacombs where these women were imprisoned earlier, except that here, Wyler uses the dark enclosure as a forerunner of rebirth. As the water flowing from the storm mingles with Christ's blood, the women are cured of their leprosy, symbolically cleansed by the blood of Christ. (in this film, as in
The Big Country
, water has redemptive associations; this connection is reversed in
The Collector
.)

The final scene finds Judah, who followed Jesus and witnessed the crucifixion, entering his home and meeting Esther there. In another of Wyler's dramatic staircase scenes, he then sees his mother and sister, cured of their leprosy, at the top of the stairs. In a framing that matches the end of
The Heiress
, Judah ascends the stairs, but whereas Catherine's destination is not pictured in the earlier film, here, the camera follows Judah to the top, where he embraces the women amid the swelling of religious music.