When Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ landed in New York on December 30, 1925, it was less a movie than a declaration. A fledgling studio eager to show its supremacy, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had created the largest, the most expensive, the most technologically audacious production the industry had ever known. Audiences were not asked to see Ben-Hur; they were ordered to attend. A century later, the film, whose centerpiece was a career-reviving performance by Ramon Novarro as Judah Ben-Hur, remains one of the silent era's greatest achievements: an unparalleled hybrid of biblical solemnity, humanistic pathos and high-end spectacle.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Adapting Lew Wallace's 1880 novel was never going to be easy. Ben-Hur was more than popular literature. It was a cultural icon, widely praised for its Christian message and moral seriousness. The stage version had already prepared audiences for pageantry on an enormous scale. The film would be measured by piety as much as by art. MGM knew the picture had to deliver Roman thrills, but also to be reverent enough to please clergymen, parents, and a public that had never considered the story sensational, only inspirational.
Early development reflected that pressure. Names rose and fell as potential directors and stars, and for a time even Rudolph Valentino’s name circulated as a possible Judah Ben-Hur. But MGM wanted something more than a star vehicle. This was to be a studio-defining epic, the film that would announce MGM as Hollywood’s most powerful and prestigious operation.
Filming began abroad. Rome was selected for its sense of reality and its monumental architecture. Gigantic sets were built outside the city, in its surrounding countryside. There were streets of Jerusalem and the grand gates of Rome, full of thousands of extras. The shoot in Europe soon ran into serious difficulties.
There were creative differences, logistical problems and clashes of authority. Director Charles Brabin and leading man George Walsh were both fired. The film, already expensive, was in effect shut down and restarted.
The reshoot would be crucial. MGM sent director Fred Niblo to supervise the reshot scenes and cast Ramon Novarro as the star. Novarro's star quality and screen presence could blend romantic vulnerability and heroic dignity in equal measure. Novarro was no second-choice actor. He was a deliberate one. Judah Ben-Hur needed someone who could display spiritual anguish as ably as physical courage, and Novarro's emotional range was perfect. His face could express loss, wrath, and forgiveness with an eloquence the silent screen required.
Niblo's direction, in which events were streamlined and given greater coherence, added to this premise personal betrayal within the backdrop of historical calamity. Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince living in Roman-occupied Judea, is reunited with his childhood friend, Messala, who is now a Roman tribune. But their friendship is not enough to withstand the political truth: Messala requires Judah's allegiance to Rome; Judah will not abandon his own people. When an accident during a Roman procession result in a governor being injured, Messala capitalizes on the chaos to ruin Judah's family. Judah is sentenced to slavery, his mother and sister are imprisoned, and his entire life is destroyed overnight.
From there Ben-Hur becomes the story of descent and return. Judah endures the galleys, escape by chance and persistence, and is finally reborn into wealth and revenge. On his way, the tale comes again and again into the orbit of the unseen Christ. Never are we allowed to see Jesus' face. The tactic is both pious and dramatically brilliant. Christ is signified by reaction, by light and gesture and the changing faces of the people who meet him.
While the spiritual material required restraint, the spectacle demanded excess. Naval battles were staged off the Italian coast and later augmented in California. Palaces, forums, and arenas were constructed at immense cost. By the time the production returned to MGM’s Culver City base in 1925, Ben-Hur had become one of the most expensive films ever attempted. But with the studio’s full infrastructure now in place, order replaced chaos.
That command reached its zenith in the chariot-race arena erected in Southern California, especially for the film. The race itself became cinema's most mythic action set piece. Filmed with an array of cameras and played out over weeks, it used thousands of extras, trained horses and expert stunt riders. The editing took raw peril and shaped it into choreographed fury—clouds of dust, wheels exploding, bodies tossed aside in unbridled crescendo.
Messala, played by Francis X. Bushman, is imperial hubris refined to a brilliant point. Against Novarro, Bushman is majestic. Their conflict is not only physical; it is moral. Judah's triumph is savage and showy, but it does not return to him what was stolen. It sharpens the conflict within him, making the film transcend mere revenge to spiritual redemption.
Novarro’s performance is central to that transition. He brings to Judah a humanity that grounds the enormity around him. His Judah is never merely symbolic; he is wounded, proud, and searching. Silent cinema demanded that emotion be legible without dialogue, and Novarro’s gift lay in his expressive restraint. Even amid the film’s grandest moments, his performance remains intimate.
Ben-Hur premiered one-hundred years ago at New York's Geo. M. Cohan Theatre on Broadway on December 30, 1925. (New York Daily News, December 31, 1925)
The final act returns Judah to Judea and to the Crucifixion's shadow. His mother and sister are not spared from suffering, which grounds the story's moral dimension. Redemption comes not through conquest but compassion, as Judah witnesses Christ's death and releases his hatred at last. The ending provides reunion and healing but frames it as spiritual awakening rather than simple narrative reward.
The chariot race filmed at Venice and La Cienega Blvd's in Culver City.
Behind the scenes' filming.
Ben-Hur received a universal critical and commercial response upon its release. Its magnitude and technical mastery, as well as its respectful treatment of religious themes, were widely lauded by critics. With its box office performance, the film soon became one of the highest-grossing films of its time and affirmed MGM as a producer of prestigious films. However, the film's very high production costs rendered its immediate financial success more complex.
In the years after its release, Ben-Hur continued to gain in stature. Sound-era reissues and later restorations brought out the original color sequences and confirmed its impact for new generations. The chariot race became the standard by which all cinematic spectacles would be measured. More than that, the film showed that the movies could combine mass entertainment with moral seriousness and could absorb sacred stories and return them as shared experience.
For Ramon Novarro, Ben-Hur was a coronation. In the role of Judah Ben-Hur, he bore one of the Western world's most hallowed tales and became a heroic ideal of the 1920s: he was romantic, he was resilient, he was undeniably human. His performance helped define MGM's image and established him as one of the most important stars in silent cinema.
As Ben-Hur reaches its hundredth anniversary, it stands not simply as an artifact of excess, but as a testament to what silent film could achieve at its height—emotion rendered monumental, spectacle shaped by purpose. At its center remains Novarro, whose Judah still races across the screen not as a relic, but as a living reminder of cinema’s power to elevate human experience.
Readers interested in the full arc of Novarro’s remarkable life and career—including the complexities behind his public image—may explore my published biography Ramon Novarro (1999), which examines the man behind one of silent Hollywood’s most enduring legends. A century later, Ben-Hur endures not only as MGM’s impossible epic, but as Ramon Novarro’s defining triumph.
What does Ben-Hur mean to you a century later—its spectacle, its faith, or Ramon Novarro’s performance—and how do you think it still resonates today? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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