The other night I saw Ben Hur for the first time. Marty hadn’t seen it either and begged me several times to turn it off.<\/p>\n
“Hnh? Gay!” I thought, watching Massalla (Stephen Boyd) and Ben Hur (Charlton Heston), or so it seemed to me, but this was crazy-making as I couldn’t see Charlton Heston knowingly playing gay subtext.<\/p>\n
I also for some reason kept thinking, “Count of Monte Cristo.”<\/p>\n
Afterwards I looked up Ben Hur, first the novel, which is a bad book that is composed of set-up and dialogue. Set-ups are down the order of “…Ben-Hur entered Ilderim’s tent. He had taken a plunge into the lake, and breakfasted, and appeared now in an under-tunic, sleeveless, and with skirt scarcely reaching to the knee.”<\/p>\n
The kind of description that was passed off to me as writing when I was a kid, and it only makes sense that Ben-Hur reined supreme until Gone With the Wind, which at least added a little personality oomph.<\/p>\n
The author, it seems, was partly inspired by “The Count of Monte Cristo” and had it in mind for much of the book.<\/p>\n
Then I looked up the movie and found that Gore Vidal had been an uncredited screenwriter and that there was indeed a homosexual subtext and that Stephen Boyd was advised to play his part as a vengeful rejected lover while Charlton Heston was oblivious.<\/p>\n
(I’ve not a clue when I originally saved this to post. Was moved up to the present unintentionally.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other night I saw Ben Hur for the first time. Marty hadn’t seen it either and begged me several times to turn it off. “Hnh? Gay!” I thought, watching Massalla (Stephen Boyd) and Ben Hur (Charlton Heston), or so it seemed to me, but this was crazy-making as I couldn’t see Charlton Heston knowingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idyllopuspress.com\/meanwhile\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idyllopuspress.com\/meanwhile\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idyllopuspress.com\/meanwhile\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idyllopuspress.com\/meanwhile\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idyllopuspress.com\/meanwhile\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idyllopuspress.com\/meanwhile\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idyllopuspress.com\/meanwhile\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idyllopuspress.com\/meanwhile\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idyllopuspress.com\/meanwhile\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}