An Irishman's Diary

HALF-A-CENTURY of cinematic violence later, the chariot race death scene in Ben-Hurno longer has the power to shock audiences, but it must have been cutting-edge in 1959. When I first saw the film on re-release nearly 20 years later, Massala's comeuppance under the horses' hooves still looked impressively grisly – although by then the myth that a real stuntman had died during filming probably added to the effect.

According to most of those involved, no such death happened. Nor can you see a red Ferrari parked in the background during the race. Nor was Charlton Heston visibly wearing a wristwatch as he hurtled around the course. It appears these rumours are no more true than – sadly – the one about John Wayne in that other religious epic (and monumental turkey): The Greatest Story Ever Told.

I won’t repeat the Wayne myth here, for fear of adding credence to it.

Oh, all right, you dragged it out of me. It has been widely claimed that the first takes of his only line in the film – in which he played a Roman soldier at the Crucifixion, who says: “Truly, this man was the son of God” – lacked sufficient feeling.

So the director asked him to try again and this time put some “awe” into it. Whereupon Wayne uttered the improved line: “Aw, truly, this man was the son of God.” No, I don’t believe it either. I wish people would stop repeating these lies.

The Greatest Story Ever Told(1965) was one of the great cinematic disasters, unsurpassed until Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate 15 years later. In its original form, it ran for more than four hours. And despite having undergone repeated cuts in a vain attempt to make it pacy, the version I eventually saw still seemed to last for days.

I suffered a disturbing flashback of the experience the other day when receiving a press release about an upcoming RTÉ Concert Orchestra production of the same name. Mercifully, this version of The Greatest Story Ever Told, at the National Concert Hall in April, will not entail having to watch the film.

The title is merely an umbrella for an evening of music from all the Hollywood bible epics: The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, The Robe, et al. Highlights will also include Ben-Hur's celebrated "Parade of the Charioteers", one of the pieces that deservingly won am Oscar for Miklós Rósza, even if it was overshadowed by the spectacle itself.

The chariot race was in some respects a film within a film. It was sub-contracted to a separate director, took months to complete, and involved 8,000 extras. And amid all its epic proportions, it also marked a small milestone in the history of Irish cinema.

The unfortunate Messala was played by a Belfast man, Stephen Boyd, whose career probably reached its climax during the race, or to be more exact shortly afterwards. His character’s trampling by the horses is not, strictly speaking, the death scene. Messala lingers long enough subsequently to inform his nemesis (Ben-Hur himself) that his family is still alive, in a leper colony. Only then does he expire, with a realism that drew Boyd a letter of praise from the American Medical Association.

After an acting apprenticeship that had ranged from playing an RUC man in a BBC Northern Ireland radio series, The McCooeys, to playing an IRA man in The Man Who Never Was, Boyd had truly arrived in the form of a dying Roman.

But the lasting impression he made in the role was a mixed blessing. He was condemned to wear tunics and togas for years afterwards, even being the original choice for Mark Antony, opposite Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, until circumstances forced him to make way for Richard Burton. He was Ireland’s biggest Hollywood star since Barry Fitzgerald. But the studio machine ground him down. By 1973, his career on the slide, he declared himself “sick and tired” of acting.

He died four years later, still in his 40s, while playing golf. The Irish Times'sthen film critic, Godfrey Fitzsimons, mused that Boyd's career had suffered from his miscasting as an old-style studio star: "Physically he transmitted virility, but his features, with their rather over-tilted nose, deprived him of a flawless matinee-idol profile. It was, rather, a face with character, and in other times, Boyd could have built a fine reputation as a character actor."

An interesting footnote to his performance in Ben-Hurwas provided, decades later, by Gore Vidal. Vidal was among the uncredited writers on the film and in 1995 claimed he had persuaded the director to introduce a homosexual subtext to the relationship between the male leads. This allegedly involved Boyd's character gazing intensely at Heston's character over a goblet of wine, to hint that they had been lovers and that he hoped for an imminent reconciliation.

Vidal went on to say that this had all been explained to Boyd but kept secret from Heston, who would have “fallen apart” had he known. Cynics suspect the story was just one of his attempts to rile the famously conservative Heston. And if so, it worked: Heston was furious. It may have suited the mischievous Vidal that Boyd was no longer around to debunk yet another myth from the heyday of the swords-and-sandals epic.

The RTE Concert Orchestra presents

The Greatest Story Ever Told

— musical highlights from Hollywood’s biblical epics — at the National Concert Hall on April 4th.