What makes a good Jesus movie? That is admittedly a loaded question, but on weekends like this when the airwaves and streaming services are awash in biblical epics of every stripe—those appealing to followers of the New Testament and those favoring only the Old—it is a query that arises time and again in my mind. Whether you love or hate the Hollywood hokum of Cecil B. DeMille and King Vidor, there are many excellent films derived from the Torah. In the modern era as well, storytellers as eclectic as Darren Aronofsky and Ridley Scott return to those same tales to perhaps checkered results. Yet when it comes to the New Testament and the stories and teachings of Christ, the cinematic offerings always appear sparser and strangely limiting. To be sure, there have been many movies made about Jesus, perhaps more so than ever these days with indie distributors, speciality labels, and unified church groups producing faith-based programmers every Easter, including this one. They all tend to dutifully pull from the Gospels of Luke or Matthew or Mark, and sometimes sprinkle in a little Charles Dickens for good measure (no, really). But by and large, these films have the stilted delivery of a Sunday school recitation—they repeat the beats a congregation knows by heart while offering little of the awe or wonder, or self-reflection that the story is meant to provoke. Curiously, this is more or less the case as well with the much higher production valued versions made by Hollywood during the height of the biblical epic craze in the 1950s and ‘60s. There was a lot more pomp and splendor provided by Nicholas Ray’s resources on the original King of Kings movie in 1961, or George Stevens’ in The Greatest Story Ever Told circa ‘65, but the determination to not offend or upset any Christian ticket-buyer caused both films to have an airless tedium that time has made no less dire. Still there’s one exception from this same era that I think might come the closest to cracking the code of making a good movie about Christ that neither offends the devout—like otherwise two terrific films shrouded in doubt and self-examination, Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)—nor bores everyone else to tears. And the secret might be that while deliberately echoing the pageantry of DeMille, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur was not a movie about Jesus Christ the man; instead it thrillingly, and without existential complexity, reflects the values of Jesus Christ the teacher. There might be some who discount this nearly four-hour epic set as much in Rome and the Mediterranean as the Holy Lands as a Jesus movie. For most, it’s simply remembered for that spectacular chariot race filmed in glorious 65mm and just about the widest possible aspect ratio. But there’s a reason it was the second most successful film ever when released in 1959, and it’s the same as what caused the novel, written by Civil War veteran Lew Wallace, to become the most popular American fiction of the late 19th century. As its subtitle assures us, this is “A Tale of the Christ,” and the first scene of the movie is a silent, painterly recreation of the Christmas story—a feat bookended by a similarly hushed reenactment of the death and implicit resurrection on the other side of the picture. In between those two sequences, Christ is a figure felt throughout the film but never quite seen. His presence permeates though, elevating the film’s central narrative about one Hebrew prince named Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and his personal rivalry with childhood soulmate turned autocratic oppressor, the Roman tribute Messala (Stephen Boyd), into a reclamation project. Theirs is the classic revenger’s story extracted from its most adventurous and swashbuckling interpretations, a la Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Despite being best pals in their youth—if not something more according to one of the film’s screenwriter Gore Vidal—Messala cruelly betrays his kindred spirit for advancement in the Roman machine, and Judah is sentenced to die on a galley ship as a slave. Through luck (or providence), he is then spared from a shipwreck and watery grave. He escapes his fate, rises to an unlikely status of renown in the Roman world, and uses it to return home and challenge Messala to what amounts to a climactic chariot race to the death. It is a story of spurned fraternal love, and through it all the screenplay not so subtly expounds on the emptiness of revenge and how killing Messala will not restore to Judah a sister and mother who were condemned to a leper colony, nor will it fill the void in his soul. Meanwhile, constantly in the margins of his life, there is a strange carpenter with an ethereal draw. He is the empathetic man on the desert road who offers Judah the Slave water when his Roman masters seek only to bask in his dehydrated despair. The same man is there again on a mount outside of Jerusalem when Ben-Hur can only think of his petty personal problems, vacillating between being a wealthy Roman pawn or a penniless Jewish rebel. That figure is also finally at the end of the film in need of Judah’s own help while carrying a cross up a hill. So yes, it is a story of Christ, but one which has the restraint to only nod toward Christ’s affect on others as opposed to the special effects they might promise. Never once is Jesus’ face seen on the screen, but without doubt this is every American Sunday school’s vision of Jesus. The best religious scene in the movie has been parodied, including quite hilariously by the Coen Brothers, but there is a reason they were still thinking about it 60 years after the fact. In the scene where Jesus gives water to a dying man, the divinity of the Son of God is explicit despite being only inferred. We see simply a hand holding Judah’s face as he desperately sips from a wooden ladle of water, oblivious to the stranger’s palm cradling the makeshift cup and his head. Only after tasting life again does Ben-Hur look up and recognize something in this man. It’s something a scornful Roman centurion also sees when threatening to whip the carpenter before being startled into lowering his weapon and looking away in shame from Christ’s gaze. There is no doubt in this film that this is an assured and confident Son of God who lacks the doubt of Scorsese and Willem Dafoe’s far more complex and human interpretation of the figure. That confidence is also probably what most want in an Easter movie, and despite lacking Scorsese’s messy humanity, Wyler’s film is neither pedantic or preachy in its religiosity. It’s heavy-handed in intent—it is a Hollywood biblical epic!—but by refusing to show Jesus’ face or even one of those miracles for the first three hours, Ben-Hur is able to create some of the awe and ethereal majesty the gospels tell us occurred. A touch of grace goes a long way, and even in fleeting ellipses sprinkled throughout three and a half hours, they’re more than enough. They evoke the mystique and mystery folks go to church for, without feeling like you’re getting the long-winded sermon too. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! And by the end, Christ’s divinity is proven in one last miracle: Jesus’ dying hands touch Judah’s family, curing a sister and mother of leprosy like dirt that’s washed away by the falling rain. This is a full-blown Jesus movie that makes mountains out of a mount. When taking the project, Wyler was primarily known as a director of intimate dramas with often melodramatic and psychological underpinnings. He made what is still the only Wuthering Heights adaptation worth a damn (the 1939 one starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, of course) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Roman Holiday (1953). At the time, he claimed he wanted to make the thinking man’s biblical epic as well, which was clearly a shot fired at DeMille. He later expounded that it “took a Jew to make a good film about Christ” (Wyler was himself Jewish). These might be pithy one-liners from a director at the end of his life looking back on a film that won him an Oscar, but they also ring true. It took some distance from the Jesus story to make a worthwhile film out of it. To be clear, there have been other good, and arguably better, films about Christ. I am personally quite fond of Jesus Christ Superstar and Last Temptation, but one was dreamed up by a lyricist and atheist so struggling with his doubts that he made Judas his sympathetic point-of-view character; the other is directed by a true believing Catholic who also wanted to interrogate his doubt and, possibly, Christ’s own sense of despair and disbelief. In other words, it was a movie that caused zealots to burn down a movie theater in Paris. On the other side of the coin, is the forced piety and frankly menacing zealotry of Mel Gibson’s dreary passion play and all the incurious pablum made in its boffo wake. Then there is the thinking mind behind Ben-Hur. It tells its story with plain directness and vigilant, reassuring comfort; it also found a way to passionately demonstrate how Jesus’ teachings can cause a man to become better and forsake the sword… but not before having an amazing chariot sequence. We’re talking about one of the best scenes in movie history. Hallelujah, saints be praised.