Is Ben-Hur a gay film?

Reminds me of Groucho Marx's famous exchange with a guest on his You Bet Your Life quiz program. The woman told him she had something like 8-9 kids, and Groucho asked why so many. "Well, I love my husband," the woman responded. "I love my cigar, too," said Groucho on national television, "but I still take it out every once in awhile."

rufnek, you are just full of awesome obscure trivia. Very cool, kinda like, hmmm... kinda like a one-eyed cat peeping in a sea food store.

Speaking about a fellow Ulsterman in that way? Disgraceful!

I'm now racking my brains trying to figure out where I first heard the Ben Hur rumours. It was certainly in pre-Internet times which rules out those daft gossip sites but it doesn't rule out the books of Mr Kenneth Anger, that well-known and totally trustworthy documentarian of the Golden Age of Hollywood. *cough*

What's your take on the (in)famous scene between Larry Olivier and Tony Curtis which was originally cut from Sparticus, by the way?

Apropos to nothing: I saw TC on TV last night and the poor bloke looks awful - in a wheelchair and seemingly deaf as the proverbial post. He's finally worked out that wig-wearing is definitely uncool, though, and has supplemented it with a massive Stetson...

(That's 'Stetson' and not 'stepson')

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

I have Ben a "him" before, but never have Ben a "Her"


ummm yeah ...nm......moving on..

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“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton

Meaning what exactly? Ben as a gay is a "she"? What?

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I suppose that's the scene where Olivier is in the Roman tub and Curtis is washing his back? Well, Romans had slaves and a slave's duty sometimes included scrubbing the master's back, so that scene would have be accurate. But why is a scene like that between two men thought to be homosexual while no one says anything about numberous scenes in which the new addition to a harem is being bathed by other women? Didn't Liz Taylor have a similar scene when she's being bathed and dried by other women in Cleopatra while all the buzz was about her affair with Burton?

What about scenes in films like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and The Missouri Breaks in which gunmen break in on a potential victim in the bathtub? Or the closing scene in Cowboy, with Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon relaxing in adjacent tubs while shoot cockroaches off the wall? And didn't John Wayne get into a fight in a public bath house in North to Alaska?

As far as I can remember Taylor and Burton weren't having a conversation about preferring both snails and oysters (or cabbages, I can't remember now) at the time. The dialogue was more controversial at the time than merely seeing two men having a manly bath.

Apropos to your final paragraph I now can't get the theme song from North To Alaska out of my head. Damn!

I didn't recall the dialogue, but I'm sorely sorry for inflicting that stupid tune on you.

No, it's just really old.

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TCM showed it today; Christmas. my friend came by and I remarked do you think this is a gay movie? He said, yes, when we were kids, no; but in retrospect it has it all; and he's gay; his partner thought it was also. I'm glad to have found this forum so I wasn't completely off. The comment about Wyler's film the Children's Hour was very interesting.

Well i went thru a phase where i was a boy trapped in a womans body, lasted almost a year.

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"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.

Is it a gay film?

Well, who knows?

It is hardly clear in the way it is written that the motive for the turning is because of gay rejection.

The more obvious explanation is, although the baddie knows the truth, the incident requires a scapegoat because the real explanation isn't going to placate the populace or his superiors. Someone has to pay.

Gore Vidal like a lot of Hollywood personalities is a storyteller even when he isn't getting paid for it. Maybe he told Wyler about the gay subtext, maybe he didn't. And if he told Wyler that doesn't mean he made it part of his interpretation. Maybe he told Boyd, maybe he didn't, Vidal didn't tell that story until Boyd and Wyler were dead so couldn't confirm it or not. And not telling Heston about it because he would have had a fit is suspect. Why would they know Heston would have a fit? He was known as a liberal at the time. His politics changed much later. He wasn't right-wing John Wayne.

If the relationship was really meant to be gay, and the motive was rejection, they could have made it much more explicit without getting in trouble with the code. It had become much more flexible by then. Even back in the forties look what they got away with in The Maltese Falcon? Joe Cairo is incredibly gay. And it is a little more subtle, but the Greenstreet and Cook characters are implied to be gay as well. Ben Hur, the supposed gay theme, nobody knew it was there until Gore Vidal said it was many years later when there was nobody alive who could contradict him.

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