Watch Ben Hur For Free

i must have seen a different film!!

Good movie but grossly overrated

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Blistering performances.

It's true that film makers were still feeling their way in the 1900s, but that's no excuse for a film to be boring now. Look at "Le voyage dans la lune" or "The Great Train Robbery", both of which came several years before Ben-Hur 1907. Even "Sherlock Holmes Baffled", a silly trick film from 1900, is still amusing.The story is fragmented and would only make sense if you already knew it. (Which, to be fair, was likely at the time; Ben-Hur was as popular then as Harry Potter is now.) The chariot race is pathetic, being nothing more than the horses passing the camera several times until the movie ends. It would have been difficult to film an exciting chariot race within the limitations of the time, but this was not a good workaround. The only saving grace of this movie is that, like others of the time, it is short, barely ten minutes long.Ben-Hur 1907 is proof that crappy cash-ins have been around even in the early days of cinema. We are fortunate it has survived, if only because that prevents any mystique from being attached to it, as has happened with films like "The Great Gatsby (1925)".

Most people know Lew Wallace's tale of Ben Hur mostly from the movie starring Charlton Heston, but there are other versions out there too, several of them considerably older. This one here may be the first and it was released shortly after the death of the aforementioned author almost 110 years ago. Unfortunately, if you don't know the story, you will have absolutely no clue what is going on. It is a black-and-white silent film and intertitles are basically non-existent here, which makes it impossible to understand the plot. This is also why I cannot recommend this one. There are films from the 19th century that are considerably better than this one and the only area where it sort-of delivers are the costumes I guess. Thumbs down. Don't watch.

This movie shows how way behind France the USA was in 1907 in film-making. In fact, most of the movies being shown in the nickelodeons that had multiplied all over the US in that year were from France, and even most of the output of the American Lubin company were copies of or just pirated French movies. Pathe in France was the first real movie studio to be up on its feet. When you compare the sophistication their The Life and Passion of Christ, made the same year, with this Ben Hur, it's astonishing to think that things were going to completely turn around within a decade. This movie is really worth seeing though; it's an unforgettable experience! Particularly the chariot race where we see even more than ten, even more than twenty even, people wave their arms up and down for several minutes and there is a brief blur of a chariot going by every now and then, until the card suddenly comes up to say The Victory of Ben Hur. The camera is completely static and the actors just wave their arms around in front of a stage set, endlessly. The 'Ben Hur Goes to the Galleys' section is just that, people waving their arms up and down against each other interminably, when Ben Hur is being arrested, in a house. No boat. No sea. And then straight into the 'chariot race', which at least was filmed from an angle, to try and keep the chariot in camera for a fraction of a second longer. But at least they made something! And there they still are, and continue to be, though they have all died, gesturing forever in silence.

I saw the first (1907) Ben Hur about 25 years ago in a film society back to back double feature with the Charlton Heston version. My memories are therefore fragmentary.The film should be called "Illustrated scenes from the life of Ben Hur" as it really doesn't try to tell the story in the time available. If you hadn't read the book you wouldn't know what was going on. One of my recollections is my wife nudging me and saying "there's the tile that's going to fall". Above the rather pathetic and bored looking extras (showing off their knees in Roman army costume) one roof tile was very different from the rest - it wasn't painted onto the set!! Sure enough, Ben Hur leaned rather obviously on this brick.The chariot race sticks in my mind too. A bunch of extras starts jumping up and down and two chariots race by the camera. The extras calm down and look bored for a while then start jumping up and down for the next rapid pass of two chariots. I can't remember how many times this was repeated, we were all laughing so hard that tears were running down my face.It is mercifully short, and interesting to compare with the 1925 big budget spectacular (also silent of course) which foreshadows the third version with amazing special effects.