In an 1887 letter to his wife, Susan, famed author Lew Wallace told her that he looked to her and his best-selling novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ “to keep
me unforgotten after the end of life.” Susan did all she could to honor her
husband’s wishes. With the help of Mary Hannah Krout, a Crawfordsville writer,
she completed Wallace’s unfinished autobiography and saw it through to
publication. Susan had to use letters and other material to cover her husband’s
life from the retreat at the Civil War Battle of Monocacy in 1864 to his death
in 1905.
Although Lew Wallace had been famous enough to have several
schools named in his honor in Indiana, his memory endures today thanks to Ben-Hur, a book that has never been out
of print. The novel’s popularity has been helped through the years by stage and
film productions. While he was still alive, Wallace received many requests to
turn his best-selling work into a play. He resisted such attempts, however,
fearing that no production could accurately portray Jesus Christ or the
exciting chariot race.
In 1899 Wallace reached an agreement with Marc Klaw and
Abraham Erlanger, owners of a theatrical syndicate, to turn his novel into a
play. The men agreed that Christ would not be played by an actor, but would
only be represented by a beam of light. The question of how to hold a chariot
race on stage was solved by having horses run on treadmills built into the
floor while the scenery moved behind them. Seeing the elaborate sets
constructed for the stage version of his novel moved Wallace to exclaim: “My
God! Did I set all of this in motion?”
The play opened on November 29, 1899, at the Broadway
Theater in New York City. Although the play received mixed reviews, audiences
were thrilled and filled seats for every performance. In addition to its
successful run on Broadway, the play traveled throughout the country and in
Europe and Australia as well. People who had never before been to the
theater—especially those with strong religious beliefs who had viewed such
productions before as wicked—flocked to see Ben-Hur.
By the time of its last performance in 1921, an estimated twenty million people
had seen the play.
Ben-Hur seemed
like the perfect match for America’s newest craze in the early twentieth
century—motion pictures. Spurred on by such inventors as America’s Thomas
Edison and France’s Auguste and Louis Lumière,
motion pictures, or movies, had become a popular form of entertainment by the
early 1900s. In 1907 a company called Kalem produced a short film based on Ben-Hur. The company, however, had not
received permission for doing the film from either the book’s publishers or
Wallace’s family.
Learning of the film, Wallace’s
son, Henry, joined by Harper and Brothers and Klaw and Erlanger, sued Kalem for violating the book’s copyright. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court. In 1911 the Court ruled in favor of Wallace and ordered Kalem to pay
$25,000 in damages plus expenses. The case set a precedent for future
filmmakers who wanted to turn books into feature films.
The Kalem incident may have soured
Henry’s view of movies. Although he received offers for years to sell the
rights to his father’s work for films, he refused. “I will oppose in every way
possible all attempts to produce any of General Wallace’s works in moving
pictures,” he said. “The reason is because the average moving picture shows are
wretched exhibitions utterly unworthy of dignified consideration.”
Henry’s opinion on the film
industry changed in 1915 after seeing D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. The three-hour-long silent film thrilled
audiences with its elaborate story and dramatic depiction of America following
the Civil War. At first, Henry sought a million dollars for the rights to film Ben-Hur. He finally reached an agreement
with Erlanger for an impressive $600,000.
The right to film the book was
obtained by the Hollywood film company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Although filming on
the movie started in Italy, skyrocketing costs caused MGM to move the picture
to California. The film starred Ramon Novarro as Ben-Hur and Francis X. Bushman
as Messala. Thousands of extras were used in the film, including such Hollywood
stars of the time as Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Harold
Lloyd. The movie ended up costing MGM $3.9 million, making it the most
expensive silent film in history.
The film opened to glowing reviews
on December 30, 1925, at the George M. Cohan Theater in New York City.
Audiences were thrilled by the movie, especially the ship fight between the
Romans and the pirates (actually filmed on the sea near Livorno, Italy) and the dramatic chariot race involving Ben-Hur and
Messala. Approximately forty cameras were used to film the chariot race. To add
realism to the race, the film’s director, Fred Niblo, offered cash prizes to
the drivers who finished first, second, and third. Although none of the
stuntmen were injured in the dangerous undertaking, several horses were killed
in a crash.
The timeless quality of Wallace’s Ben-Hur caused MGM to turn to it again
in the 1950s when the Hollywood studio found itself in a fierce competition
with a new form of entertainment—television. Hoping to attract people from
their television sets at home back into movie theaters, MGM decided to film a
new version of Ben-Hur. The studio
picked William Wyler, who had worked on the original 1925 film, to direct and
selected Charlton Heston to portray the Jewish nobleman Ben-Hur and StephenBoyd to appear as his boyhood friend and rival Messala. American actors played
most of the Jewish roles in the film, while Wyler picked British actors to
portray the Roman characters.
MGM had a lot riding on the film.
Heston noted that if the movie failed to attract customers, the studio might
have gone bankrupt. MGM officials, however, were confident that Ben-Hur could outdo what the epic The Ten Commandments, which had starred
Heston as Moses, had done at the box
office. “There aren’t more than half the Commandments you could call really
interesting,” said one MGM official. “We figure we’ve got a superior story.”
Wyler, a three-time Academy Award
winner, shot the movie on location near Rome, Italy, over a nine-month period.
Heston and Boyd were trained to drive the four-horse team and chariots by
veteran stuntman Yakim Canutt. Thousands of extras were on hand on a set
designed to resemble the Roman Circus to cheer as Heston and Boyd, who did most
of their own stunts, battled as Ben-Hur and Messala. “Thundering past those
screaming extras over the finish line was as thrilling as anything I’ve done in
pictures,” said Heston. He called the chariot race “arguably the best action
scene ever filmed.” In this case, none of the stuntmen or horses received
serious injuries during the race.
When he finished filming on
January 7, 1959, Wyler had shot a million feet of film and spent $15 million,
the most expensive movie ever made at that time. MGM had used its money wisely.
“Ben-Hur turned out to be all we
hoped for,” said Heston. The nearly four-hour movie premiered to glowing
reviews from most critics on November 18, 1959, at the Lowe’s State Theatre in
New York City. The film went on to earn more than $40 million. At the 1960
Academy Award ceremony, Ben-Hur became
the first film ever to win eleven Academy Awards, a mark later matched by the
1998 movie Titanic. Heston won the
Oscar for Best Actor and Wyler captured the statuette for Best Director.
Over the years, the 1959 Ben-Hur has continued to thrill and
inspire viewers through its frequent broadcasts on television. In 1998 the
American Film Institute named Ben-Hur as
one of the hundred greatest American movies of all time. Heston, who went on to
star in such legendary films as The Agony
and the Ecstasy and Planet of the
Apes, called his performance as Wallace’s noble Ben-Hur his “best film
work.”
Ben-Hur’s fame lives
on today (another film adaptation appeared in 2016). It has been used as the
name for towns, for such products as bicycles and candy, and for a variety of
businesses. What is often ignored, however, is the person who created the
character—Lew Wallace. His role in the history of Indiana and of the country,
however, should not be forgotten. Wallace’s life touched upon key events and
figures in the United States, from pioneer days to the Civil War and the age of
the automobile to this country’s rise to prominence at the turn of the
nineteenth century.
1 comment:
Somewhere in the Calvin Fletcher Diaries, I think about 1840, one of Calvin's sons was a clerk at a store, I think his Uncle Stoughton's on Washington St. Late one Sunday evening he heard the loud banging of street-level elevator doors on Washington St. and he wrote "It must be Wallace and his ilk!'. Lew was a teenager then.
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