Ben Hur

Ben‐Hur (1899), a melodrama by William Young. [ Broadway Theatre, 194 perf.] After a prologue recounting the legend of the three wise men, the story centers on Ben‐Hur (Edward Morgan), a good‐natured Roman Jew who is betrayed into servitude on a galley by his treacherous friend Messala (William S. Hart). Later freed by a man whose life he saved, Hur is given a good education and eventually leaves for Antioch, where his father's old servant Simonides (Henry Lee) has carefully husbanded the Hur fortune. Learning that his false friend Messala has entered a chariot race, Hur enters his own name as well. Bets carefully placed by Hur and Simonides prompt Messala to stake his whole fortune on the race. Messala attempts to panic Hur's horses, but Hur interlocks his wheels with Messala's, who is thrown and crippled. Hur wins the race. Messala is later murdered, and Hur becomes a devout Christian. Lew Wallace, whose popular novel was the source of the play, had originally refused offers from several producers to dramatize the play. The production that Klaw and Erlanger mounted was one of the most extravagant ever seen on Broadway. Besides twenty‐two speaking principals, there were eighty in the chorus and more than a hundred supers. The chariot race, using real horses (part of the time on treadmills), was as spectacular as theatrical design of the period could make it. The more serious critics were displeased, Walter Prichard Eaton dismissing it as “a thing of bombastic rhetoric, inflated scenery, pasteboard piety, and mechanical excitement.” The play was presented by innumerable touring companies, some of dubious quality, and was regularly revived successfully in major houses as late as 1916, when films began to offer a superior medium for spectacle and such theatrical mountings came to seem ludicrous by comparison.

Ben Hur is a 15 minute long 1907 silent film, the first film version of Lew Wallace's novel Ben-Hur, one of the best-selling books at that time.

This movie is most notable as a precedent in copyright law. The movie was made without the permission of the author's estate, which was common practice at that time. The screenwriter, Gene Gauntier, remarked in her 1928 autobiography how the film industry at that time infringed upon everything. As a result of the production of Ben Hur, Harper & Brothers and the author's estate brought suit against Kalem Studios, the Motion Picture Patents Company, and Gauntier for copyright infringement. The United States Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the film company in 1911. This ruling established the precedent that all motion picture production companies must first secure the film rights of any previously published work still under copyright before commissioning a screenplay based on that work.

The film was directed by Canadian director Sidney Olcott. At fifteen minutes long, only a small portion of the story was put on screen. The focus of the piece was the chariot race, which was filmed on a beach in New Jersey with local firemen playing the charioteers and the horses that normally pulled the fire wagons pulling the chariots.

External links

• Ben Hur at the Internet Movie Database
• Google Book Search file on the case Harper & Brothers v. Kalem Company (1909), from the book Select Cases on the Law of Torts, by John Henry Wigmore.

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