Digital restoration of BEN-HUR will be shown on the big screen at the Museum of the Moving Image
BEN-HUR (William Wyler, 1959)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, September 8, and Sunday, September 9, free with museum admission, 2:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
One of the grandest epics ever made, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur was shown in a new digital restoration last fall as part of the New York Film Festival’s Masterworks sidebar, and now it’s coming to the Museum of the Moving Image, where it will screen September 8-9 in the “See It Big!” series. The DCP restoration of Wyler’s remake of Fred Niblo’s 1925 silent version, which starred Ramón Novarro and Francis X. Bushman (there was also a fifteen-minute Ben Hur made in 1907, all adapted from Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel), celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the eleven-time Oscar winner, which garnered Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur), Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith as Sheik Ilderim), Best Score (Miklós Rózsa), Best Cinematography, Best Set Decoration, Best Costume Design, and Best Special Effects, among other trophies. The $15 million blockbuster tells the story of two childhood friends, Judah Ben-Hur and Messala (Stephen Boyd), who get caught up in religion, politics, and slavery in first-century Rome and eventually have a magnificent showdown on the chariot course. As cinema spectacles go, they don’t get much bigger or better than this.