Out of the vast distance of the Syrian desert, a man on a camel rides toward us, stops, sits and waits. Some time later, he sees another figure approaching and then the two wait together, until finally a third arrives, they are strangers to each other and talk about who they are and why they are there, and then mount up and ride on together, following the star to Bethlehem. This sequence, lovingly described over about 60 pages, (frequently abridged to about 30 pages and I can understand that but don’t approve) is one of the best openings to any book I know, even if you have no interest in religion. Maybe I like it mostly because it bares a faint resemblance to the opening scenes of High Noon. After that, Ben-Hur, by Lew Wallace, is pretty good, although also something of a disappointment. But that had a lot to do with Spartacus.
    While I had been seeing Spartacus, my friends mostly saw the more publicised Ben-Hur and this led to many schoolyard arguments as to which was the better film. Strangely, no one seemed to have seen both at the time, which I and they soon corrected, but attitudes were entrenched by then. It was my first experience of being one-out against the crowd and I fared badly but time saw me victorious in the end. Both films have magnificent set-pieces, the sea-battle and Chariot race from Ben-Hur, the gladiatorial duel and final battle in Spartacus, and if the former won out on the sheer spectacle scale, the latter did it with more feeling. In fact, Ben-Hur marked the death of Hollywood as they knew it then. It was an old-style film using new technology, made by an old man, whereas Spartacus had a young genius director showing glimpses of remarkable things to come. The truth was William Wyler’s best film was poorer than Stanley Kubrick’s worst.
    Aside from the set-pieces, Spartacus was still a fascinating leftwing philosophical and intellectual piece while Ben-Hur was the lot of hammy, rightwing, melodramatic, religious drivel. The best thing about Ben-Hur was the chariot race which by itself was well worth the admission fee and the four hours of otherwise boredom, but it was a frame-by-frame copy of the 1925 silent version which was even more exciting, as indeed it is regarded that the whole early film was better by most critics. The only improvement was the bigger screen and the colour—all of the race’s detail, the crashes, those heroic stretcher-bearers collecting casualties with desperate perfect timing, Messala whipping Ben-Hur, audience members trampled, and of course the magnificent squatting figure in the set, were all in the original. But my personal objection to the film was that the wonderful opening sequence in the book in which the three wise men gather in the desert, was ignored in the movie.
    Ben-Hur’s history goes back further than that, to a 1913 film version, and an earlier theatre version in which the sea battle was fought in a huge water tank on stage. But in the book, the chariot race and sea battle are both less exciting, for Lew Wallace was telling A Tale of the Christ, not an adventure yarn.
    Wallace himself is fascinating. A lawyer turned soldier who fought in the Mexican War and then took charge of the defence of Cincinnati against the Confederates in the Civil War. Afterwards, he was Governor of New Mexico at the time the outlaws rampaged there, he signed the death warrant for Billy the Kid and handed it to Pat Garrett,  and investigated and clashed with Wyatt Earp over the OK Corral killings. Then he  converted to Christianity and, when he retired, recaptured his experience of being a Jew converted to the ideas of Christ, which is the essence of Ben-Hur. You see, I had read the book before the film was released—that was why I chose to spend my hard-earned pocket money on Spartacus instead of Ben-Hur.