Synopsis
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) is Fred Niblo's silent epic, free to watch online on iFILM. A wealthy young Judean, Judah Ben-Hur, is betrayed by his boyhood friend Messala, now a Roman tribune — falsely accused, Judah is condemned to the galleys while his mother and sister rot in prison.
The oars don't break him. Judah saves a Roman admiral during a sea battle, earns his freedom, a fortune and a Roman name, then comes home with a single purpose: revenge. It all narrows to the hippodrome, where the two former friends meet in a chariot race shot with forty-two cameras on a colossal purpose-built arena, with real horses and stuntmen taking real risks. Threaded through the vendetta is a second story — the life of Christ, whose face the film almost never shows.
Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman lead the cast. This was the most expensive production of the silent era: an aborted Italian shoot had to be scrapped and the whole spectacle rebuilt in California, with several sequences hand-tinted in early two-strip Technicolor. The 1925 chariot race fed straight into William Wyler's famous Charlton Heston remake decades later. If you love grand silent cinema or Hollywood history, see the original. Stream Ben-Hur (1925) online on iFILM.
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