Millerick lost control as his chariot careened toward the middle of the track. The riders circled the racetrack, lap after lap, with no major incidents until the sixth lap, when stuntman Mickey Millerick’s chariot caught the inner rail at the south turn. Huge tapestries were flung back, and the twelve chariots dashed forward. The morning was foggy, but shortly before noon the fog lifted. There were cameras in a car driven in front of the galloping horses, inside a pit in the racetrack, behind soldiers’ shields, and even on an airplane circling the stadium. To cover every possible angle, a record forty-two cameras were strategically placed throughout the set. Reeves Eason and his sixty-two assistants, including then-unknowns Henry Hathaway and William Wyler (the director of the 1959 remake).
Perched atop a one hundred-foot platform, Niblo was officially present to supervise the filming, though the actual direction was the work of B.
Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Betty Bronson, Colleen Moore, Lillian Gish, and others were on hand along with three thousand extras to cheer Novarro – insured by the studio for $3 million – Bushman, ten stuntmen charioteers, and their forty-eight horses.
CHARIOT RACES WERE REAL IN LATEST BEN HUR FREE
For the filming of the master shot, MGM invited stars, directors, writers, publicists, and local dignitaries, many of whom were free to come because other studios had declared that Saturday, October 3, an unofficial holiday. The text below is from my Ramon Novarro biography Beyond Paradise.Īfter experiencing the relatively easy production of The Midshipman, Novarro found himself back on the Ben-Hur grind in late summer, getting ready for the climactic chariot race, which became a major Hollywood event. Bushman, a former 1910s superstar, are the two rivals in the film.
Ramon Novarro, soon to become a superstar, and Francis X. The 1959 MGM version of Ben-Hur is best remembered for its chariot race, which happens to be an imitation of the superior 1925 race for that studio’s mammoth – and highly problematic – production of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.