Without question MGM's $15 million dollar 1959 update of their own 1925 masterwork, Ben-Hur, was one of the biggest gambles in movie history. Produced by Sam Zimbalist, directed by Hollywood veteran William Wyler and re-adapted from the General Lew Wallace novel by perhaps as many as 40 screenwriters, though eventually credited to Karl Tunberg, the 212 minute long film was a critical and commercial smash.

Earning some $73 million in domestic grosses it succeeded in helping MGM avoid bankruptcy and won the unprecedented total of 11 Academy Awards from 12 nominations. A veritable Oscar juggernaut and keystone in cinema history Ben-Hur is also one of the longest, most overtly religious and taxing movie-going experiences ever produced for mainstream audiences by a major studio.

That the film has established an enduring and widely celebrated place in the pantheon of important American films is an understatement of basic misrecognition. Wyler's picture is a spectacular epic with a creepy kind of Christian morality that turns the entire affair into a creaking portrait of the sacred and the profane. Thus Ben-Hur is a reminder of two aspects implicit in Hollywood filmmaking that end up dividing the film roughly in half to make it something less than the sum of its specifically excellent parts.

Based on Wallace's story of Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a Jewish prince living in Jerusalem, the movie's trouble is its explicit devotion to Christian lore and legend. While its piety is laudable from a certain point-of-view, the overall message of peace, forgiveness and filial love among members of the human family are constantly at odds with the elements of the film that truly sting with sensation and visceral excitement.

It's as if Zimbalist and Wyler enlisted Wallace's novel and borrowed ideas from MGM's earlier production only to boomerang back into the problem facing any feature film trying to demonstrate serious religious principles on the big screen. No matter how elegantly and fairly they portray the life, faith and times of the historical Jesus, they also present an end result that's very close to being propagandistic, manipulative and overly simplistic.

Every time the picture focuses on the life of Jesus from its preamble before his birth and leading up through his crucifixion and death it fails to adequately connect this "tale of the Christ", as the film is subtitled, with the story of Ben-Hur. Of course there is an argument concerning Jesus as the true centerpiece of the film but this idea is hard to accept since it would be more appropriate in a longer, and more convincing, theological survey than in the one contained in this film primarily meant to entertain mass audiences. It's this very effort to entertain the widest possible audience, in fact, where Ben-Hur demonstrates the other half of its motive beyond a representing certain foundation legends that support Western religious thought.

Every time the picture focuses on the life of Ben-Hur, however, from his early comforts as a Jewish prince through his transformation into a man of God, it succeeds in achieving its epic aims without dropping a moment to yawn. Naturally his adventures involve violent circumstances, the struggle for individual survival, a certain amount of romance and several extended action sequences that betray the filmmakers' true excellence aside from a half-hearted Sunday school lesson.

His secular adventures laden with retribution, memories of innocence lost and righteous success after a long struggle that can thrill an audience despite their varying interest in the themes running throughout the film and just beneath its action. This is because Ben-Hur is a man of arms and movement. He's a hotheaded aggressor once crossed by his childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd) and it's this sense of mistaken loyalty that gives his story a sense of purpose despite the picture's overall attempt to associate him with the rise and fall of Jesus Christ within the limitations imposed by Roman society.

Though the movie undoubtedly springs from this Roman preoccupation with destroying Jesus, Ben-Hur's world turning upside down is what gives the movie its motion. Without him, then, there's no reason for audiences to identify with the film and without the lure of this kind of identification there would be no through-line to enjoy what's happening unless spectators are willing to ignore the purpose of feature films and endure a 212-minute long sermon.

Thankfully Wyler saw through this problem and employed enough artisans, craftspeople and other technicians to furnish his film with enough moving parts to fall off the screen in torrents of spectacle. In these moments, as in the sea galley battle or the chariot sequence staged by the legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt and directed by Andrew Marton, Ben-Hur achieves its potential as a timeless work of art. Unfortunately, though, each such important moment of genius is subsequently marred by either a quick reconnection with religious legend or else too much attention lavished on the limitations of a physically impressive, but wooden, leading man.

On-screen through most of the film Charlton Heston's reputation in Hollywood was secured with this performance in which he was stripped to little more than a loin cloth in certain key moments just as he was meant to demonstrate the dual physical and spiritual transformations implicit in the part. Despite his career as a leading man seemingly born for roles of this size and complexity, he is a limited actor more apt to express a sense of presence than show much more emotional depth than broad happiness and anger.

Putting these many limitations aside for moment, Ben-Hur was nominated for Best Motion Picture against Anatomy of a Murder, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Nun's Story and Room at the Top though Wyler's epic wasn't to be denied at the year-end awards trough. Having previously won the top dramatic Golden Globe award as bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, its take at the Academy Awards in early 1960 was never in question, save for the number of awards it would eventually tally on its way to one of the two most awesome single celebrations in American movie history.

With the benefit of retrospect we can reflect on such decisions and offer praise where we agree with older appraisals or vilification where we don't. Not to continue carping on the overtly Christic and banal moral underpinnings of Ben-Hur, it didn't deserve the number of Oscars it received from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Admittedly its technical accomplishments make it an important spectacle with few peers in any other time period. Wyler was deserving of director of the year honors just as Edward Carfagno, William Horning and Hugh Hunt deserved the best art direction-set direction award. Likewise there is no malice towards Robert Surtees for his cinematography award, Elizabeth Haffenden for her costume design award and certainly none towards the enviable achievement of Arnold Gillespie, Robert MacDonald and Milo Lory for their special effects citation. Altogether these artisans created a palette for telling the story of Ben-Hur although the part was far outshined by his foil, Messala, whose performance by Stephen Boyd was, inexplicably, ignored by the Academy.

Yet spectacular entertainment, even spectacular entertainment with properly centered Christian themes, does not a great movie make.

Ben-Hur is so unabashedly right wing in tone and expression that it remains a picture with dubious principles and a potentially unpleasant aftertaste. Its overlays with the forgiving life of Jesus Christ are easily mingled with the terrible violence of the life and times of Ben-Hur. While this kind of peace and mayhem is exactly the stuff upon which Christian faith is based, the film's stronger moments are definitely to be found in its more violent sequences. In effect, faith is displayed as an ideal but it's the breathtaking pleasures of special effects and violence that make the picture worth watching.

In a year featuring other popular hits like Sleeping Beauty with $51 million in grosses and Some Like It Hot with a $25 million take Wyler's film was a much bigger and self-consciously serious film than its peers. As such it encouraged Christian devotees to support it as a wholesome entertainment while also appealing to less pious viewers who would thrill at the running horses, collision of ships and the struggle for one man to earn back his birthright from the flame of betrayal.

What's now inconceivable is how Ben-Hur won the Best Motion Picture award over any of four other works that are remembered by cinephiles and moviegoers alike, the world over. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot failed to receive even a nomination despite its consideration as one of the great movie comedies. Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows announced the French New Wave and ushered in space for such filmmakers as Jean Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer. Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries expanded the idea of a European art cinema, explored news themes of death and aging and heralded the coming of a screen master. Then there was the Alfred Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest with its various action sequences that continually rank among the very best ever committed to film.

Pulling these alternative histories together Ben-Hur demonstrated a standard that was later repeated by its artistic progeny, Titanic, in 1997. Also having won 11 Oscars James Cameron's movie about the most famous naval disaster of the 20th century repeated the successes of Wyler's big screen epic and passed on an award-winning formula with seemingly indisputable logic. Namely, the film of each year with the best cinematography, production design, special effects and direction that comes from a recognized source and is peopled by contemporary stars can't help but be the best movie of the year.

When given the evidence provided by Some Like It Hot, as one of four significant counter-examples, however, this logic doesn't hold true. Not when a simplistic script espousing overbearing religious beliefs is spoken by a host of actors with varying abilities over 212 minutes of screen time, intermission not included.

The real lesson is that when a creaky, ideologically conservative spectacle is unleashed on the public while being backed by the marketing muscle of one of Hollywood's biggest studios it can't help but succeed. All the more so when the right artistic elements are put in place even if their efforts don't add up to a brilliant whole the way certain laws of mathematics might imply.