Movies - Ben-Hur

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	Movies - Ben-Hur

Ben-Hur's great chariot race scene is still regarded as a triumph of silent film making. Costing between 4 and 6 million dollars, it is the most expensive silent film ever made. Ben-Hur was a blockbuster hit for newly merged Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This was the second film based on the novel Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace.

Directed by Fred Niblo, this version of Ben-Hur first appeared in 1925. The film starred Ramon Novarro as the main character Judah Ben-Hur, with Francis X. Bushman as his friend Messala and May McAvoy as Esther.

A total of 60,960 m (200,000 feet) of film was shot for the scene which was eventually edited down to 229 m (750 feet). This scene has been much imitated. It was re-created virtually shot for shot in the 1959 remake, and more recently imitated in the "pod race scene" in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace which was made almost 75 years later. Some scenes in the film were in two-color Technicolor.

A 1931 reissue added music, by the original composers William Axt and David Mendoza, and sound effects. As the decades passed, the original Technicolor segments were replaced by black-and-white dubs. These scenes were considered lost until the 1980s when Turner Entertainment (who by then had acquired the rights to the film) found the crucial sequences in a Czech film archive.

Current prints of the 1925 version are of the Turner-supervised restoration, replete with the color tints and Technicolor sections to resemble the original theatrical release, but with the addition of a newly recorded stereo orchestral soundtrack by Carl Davis which was originally recorded for a Thames Television screening of the movie.

This film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

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Movies - Ben-Hur

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