Day 74: Favorite Movie Epic/Historical Drama

BEN-HUR (1959)

It doesn't get any better than a Charlton Heston playing a Jew... again (see Moses in: The Ten Commandments). I think he did it a third time when he portrayed John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told. All sarcasm aside, I've loved this film since I was a child when it used to broadcast annually right around Easter (for obvious reasons). I feel it's the best example of 1950s classic Hollywood, when they began to expand their aspect ratio (that's image size in laymen's terms) as well as overall story size and scope to compete with the "smallness" of television (see an example here). The movie is heads and tails above most other epics if for nothing more than for the chariot race sequence.

Side Note: Heston's over-acting in Ben-Hur got him one of these:

I almost went this route:

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