One of my favorite movies is Ben-Hur.
Not because it’s necessarily one of the best movies I’ve ever see — that honor probably belongs to Shadow of a Doubt, Snowpiercer, All the President’s Men, or Spotlight — but because it’s one of the finest examples of what I like to think of as the Overblown Hollywood Epic. This particular genre, which dominated the screen in the 1950’s and 1960’s, had a sweep and scale that most modern films simply don’t, with enormous all-star casts, lavish costumes, lushly romantic scores, and Technicolor cinematography that showed off what we used to call “exotic locales” (think: countries with brown people and hot climates) or “romantic times” (think: pre-1900).
There are some truly excellent films of this type, from Lawrence of Arabia (can anyone forget the sheer physical beauty of the young Peter O’Toole?) to Spartacus (can anyone forget the heroism of those echoing cries of “I’m Spartacus!”?) to Raintree County (can anyone forget Elizabeth Taylor’s truly disturbing performance as an unstable bride?). But a lot of them were so lush, so lavish, so stuffed with beautiful costumes and stunning sets and quasi-Biblical dialogue spouted by highly trained Shakespearean actors that the modern viewer is far more likely to laugh than find themselves transported to another place or time.
I mean, seriously...just the thought of some of these makes me giggle:
- Victor Mature’s oiled muscles and caterpillar-thick eyebrows in Samson and Delilah.
- Christopher Plummer and Stephen Boyd’s less than convincing javelin technique in The Fall of the Roman Empire.
- King Solomon (Yul Brynner, in a very bad toupee and what appears to be a golf shirt) letting himself be seduced by the Queen of Sheba (Gina Lollobrigida, a cabaret-style belly dancing costume and full glamour makeup) during the excruciatingly silly orgy scene in Solomon and Sheba.
- Victor Mature’s attempt at playing a pious Christian convert in Demetrius and the Gladiators, particularly in the scene where he’s attempting to revive his ponytailed lover, Debra Paget.
- Susan Hayward as the world’s only redheaded Tartar in The Conqueror, which also featured John Wayne in ludicrous yellowface as Genghis Khan and poor Pedro Armendariz as “Jah-MOO-ga,” Wayne’s “blood brother.”
- James Mason faceplanting in the Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. role in The Prisoner of Zenda.
- The entirety of the Paul Newman/Jack Palance/Virginia Mayo atrocity The Silver Chalice, which was filmed on sets that made Biblical-era Jerusalem look like it was designed by Pablo Picasso during a bad acid trip.
- Victor Mature bellowing “More wine, you waddling toad!” at a lackey during The Egyptian, which was supposed to make stars of Edward Purdom and Bella Darvi, and didn’t.
- The entirety of Cleopatra, especially the scenes where Elizabeth Taylor’s tracheotomy scar is front and center (along with her lifted and separated breasts, and never mind that actual Egyptian women wore a breastband of some type, not a Playtex 18 Hour bullet bra).
As ridiculous as the above examples are, none of the above, not even Cleopatra or The Conqueror or the ubiquitous Mr. Mature, can quite match Ben-Hur’s combination of glossy production values, over the top staging, heavily pious storytelling, or lushly earnest acting. Just consider all the beauties you’ll find in this 3 hour and 44 minute adaptation of General Lew Wallace’s 19th century “tale of the Christ”:
- Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur, clueless and not overly intelligent scion of a wealthy Jewish family, and never you mind why they cast a big blond goy.
- A chariot race that is insanely long, insanely complicated, and still one of the finest action sequences in movie history.
- Miklos Rosza’s stirring, albeit sometimes ponderous, score.
- 10,000 extras (human), 200 camels (not human), and over 2,000 horses (primarily in the chariot race scene).
- A “Christ” who is seen only in long shots and the actual view of his godly sandaled feet.
- Several Hollywood all-purpose ethnic character actors, including Welshman Hugh Griffith as the Bedouin sheik who befriends Judah and lets him drive his team of stunning white Arabians in the hippodrome.
- The angst-ridden love story of Judah and his best friend, Messala, who loved him from their teenage years and —
Wait! I hear you cry. What “angst-ridden love story” between Judah and Messala? Charlton Heston is straight as a board and so is Judah — why, he ends up with Haya Harareet! What are you talking about, Ellid?
What I’m talking about, my friends, is a secret that one of the scriptwriters for Ben-Hur slipped into the screenplay. He kept it a secret for nearly forty years, but alert viewers noticed that Messala, the villaince, seemed unreasonably angry over his old buddy Judah saying “eh, I’m good being Jewish, no need to become a Roman or anything.” They also noticed the delicate wavery harp music in part of the scene where the boyhood chums are reunited as adults, and then there’s the toast they drink with their arms interlaced and their faces mere inches from each other, Messala’s eyes fixed on Judah’s in a gaze so intense the set nearly melts.
I refer, of course, to Gore Vidal’s revelation in the documentary The Celluloid Closet that when he was called in as a script doctor on Ben-Hur, he rewrote a few scenes with the understanding that Messala was so angry and so vengeful because he was in love with Judah, his boyhood sweetheart, and Judah had basically spurned him as an adult. It was a far better motive for Messala’s behavior than simply being upset over Judah’s insistence that he was happy the way he was, and after director William Wyler got over his initial shock he decided to give it a try.
So Vidal told Stephen Boyd, who played Messala as a scorned lover throughout the rest of the film, and what had been shaping up as a pointless quest to put Judah in his place suddenly worked. There was just one problem:
No one told Charlton Heston.
This was largely because Heston, who had married his first love in 1944 and stayed with her until his death 64 years later, was indeed straight as a board and would have gone nuts at the mere idea of playing a bisexual character. He also wasn’t nearly a good enough actor to pretend that he wasn’t aware of what Messala wanted, so William Wyler simply never told him about Vidal’s little idea. He only found out the first time he saw The Celluloid Closet, and just as predicted, he was not at all pleased.
“It irritated the hell out of me,” he wrote, and accused Vidal of being a failed script doctor who’d made the whole thing up. Vidal in turn responded with a long, detailed rebuttal, including several quotes from Heston’s memoir that make it quite clear that Vidal was involved one of the writers on the film, and that he had indeed written the crucial scene where Messala drinks to Heston with his lips, eyes, and heart.
Then again, Vidal’s subsequent literary work should have made it obvious that if any scriptwriter would (or could) have slipped a gay subtext into a blockbuster subtitled “A Tale of the Christ,” it was Gore Vidal. In particular, his 1968 novel Myra Breckenridge, which was simultaneously a satire on Hollywood and an argument that sexuality and gender are both mutable and fluid, should have tipped off the future star of Soylent Green, The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes, and that all-time classic primetime soap The Colbys that maaaaaybe Judah Ben-Hur wasn’t quite as straight as a board even if Charlton Heston most certainly was.
As for Myra Breckenridge itself...it’s complicated. The book was originally published in 1968, at the height of the sexual revolution, and having a public intellectual like Gore Vidal weigh in on traditional sex roles and sexuality automatically made it a Serious, Important Book. That Vidal was also satirizing Hollywood made it even more delicious, and many a reader doubtless spent many an hour trying to figure out the famous names behind Myra, kinky talent scout Letitia van Allen, and Myra’s uncle Buck Loner. That Myra turned out to be a transitioning MTF transsexual named “Myron” who eventually ends up reverting to neutered maleness after losing access to estrogen and having zir breast implants only made it more Serious and Important.
That Myra, who sets out to destroy traditional sexuality by raping young men with a dildo, may have been partially inspired by Vidal’s 1950’s affair with Anais Nin, was not known until much later. Nor did most people who weren’t either Hollywood insiders or New York literati know that Vidal himself was bisexual with a preference for men, particularly his life partner Howard Austen, although there were certainly rumors about his personal life. He was probably best known either as Jackie Kennedy’s distant relative (ooo!) or the Democrat who nearly got into a fistfight with William F. Buckley, Jr., at the Democratic National Convention (ouch!), not as a sexual outlier.
That as a cisgender man he probably shouldn’t have tried to write about a transwoman was not something that occured to anyone in 1968, when gender reassignment was rare, expensive, painful, and almost never spoken of except when Christine Jorgensen appeared at the local supper club.
All that aside, Myra Breckenridge was an immediate hit. It sold well in 1968, has continued to sell well over the last half century, and is widely viewed as a valuable exploration of sexual and gender issues. No less a cultural snob than the late Harold Bloom considered it part of the canon of Western literature, and even some LGBT critics still consider it a worthwhile read.
The same, alas, cannot be said for the movie.
Made only two years after the book, Myra Breckenridge should have been a smash hit. It starred one of Hollywood’s great sex symbols (Raquel Welch), Oscar winner John Huston, film critic Rex Reed in his cinematic debut, a promising newcomer named Farah Fawcett, and legendary sex bomb Mae West, who returned to film after a 27 year hiatus to play Leticia van Allen. Throw in an up and coming director (Michael Sarne), a supporting case of veteran character actors like Jim Backus, Roger C. Carmel, Grady Sutton, and John Carradine, a strapping youngster named Tom Selleck, and a generous selection of clips from classical 1940’s films that served as commentary on the action, and all the elements were in place for a classic….
Except that, well, no. Not so much.
I’d originally meant to tell the full story of one of Myra Breckenridge tonight, but after a recuperating from a concert last weekend, quite a bit of overtime this week, and the post-Black Panther adrenaline rush that kept me up until nearly 1:00 am last night, I’m not quite up to the task. And you’ll know why next week, when I tell you just how a movie with an illustrious pedigree, top cast, and generous budget ended up ruining careers, bank accounts, and reputations. Several people associated with it never worked in film again, others did their best to forget they’d ever been involved, and Gore Vidal himself disowned it.
As for why Myra Breckenridge has gone down in history as one of Holywood’s all-time stinkeroos, just take a look at the trailer:
See what I mean?
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Have ever read Myra Breckenridge? Anything else by Gore Vidal? Did you stay up late last night because you went to Black Panther and couldn’t get to sleep because you were so enthalled by Wakanda? Do you want to be Shuri when you grow up? Don’t be shy, because it’s Saturday night and you know what that means….
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