(Note: all images in this post are in the public domain.)
Without even going into the well-known degradations of modern Hollywood, I have written about the past politicization of the Academy Awards—for example, the shunning of It’s a Wonderful Life for “Best Picture” of 1946 in favor of the politicized The Best Years of Our Lives, and “Best Picture” of 1947 granted to Gentleman’s Agreement, a dull, lifeless sermon about antisemitism that strategically received its Oscar two months before Israel proclaimed its statehood. Many other examples could be given—Gary Cooper winning the 1941 “Best Actor” Oscar for his appearance in Sergeant York, a film promoting military enlistment released five months before Pearl Harbor, just as the Ben Affleck movie Pearl Harbor was released five months before PNAC’s “new Pearl Harbor” of September 11, 2001. Cooper also won “Best Actor” for 1952’s High Noon, a parable about the blacklisting of Hollywood communists, with the movie’s archvillain, “Miller,” symbolizing Joe McCarthy.
Recently I noticed an Oscar dichotomy that had escaped my attention—the reception which Quo Vadis (1951) received versus Ben-Hur (1959). Both films were lengthy epics set during Christianity’s early days. Sam Zimbalist produced both for MGM. Miklos Rózsa wrote the musical scores for both, and even re-used some of his Quo Vadis music for Ben-Hur. Each movie had distinguished casts, with Quo Vadis featuring Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, and Peter Ustinov; Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor had uncredited bit parts. Ben-Hur showcased Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, and Stephen Boyd. The films even shared some actors. In Quo Vadis, the venerable Scotsman Finlay Currie played the Apostle Peter, and in Ben-Hur was one of the three Wise Men, Balthasar, who encounters Ben-Hur during his journey home. Actress Marina Berti had a major supporting role in Quo Vadis, and a minor one in Ben-Hur.
Quo Vadis received eight Academy Award nominations; Ben-Hur got 12. (Bear in mind that Oscar categories had increased after eight years.) But here’s the punchline: Ben-Hur earned 11 Oscar wins—a record that has never been surpassed. Quo Vadis? ZERO. This must have surprised filmgoers—Quo Vadis was a smash hit, 1951’s highest-earning film, and MGM’s biggest box-office success since Gone with the Wind. Director Mervin LeRoy had asked Pope Pius XII to bless the script, which he did, saying “May your film be a successful one” in both Latin and English.1
I will certainly grant that Charlton Heston gave a more dynamic performance In Ben-Hur than Robert Taylor in Quo Vadis (for which Taylor received no nomination). And Ben-Hur achieved new heights in cinematic experience, such as its unforgettable chariot race.
But there are discrepancies that make little sense.
To authentically duplicate ancient Rome, a project that took years, the Quo Vadis crew built a set equal to four city blocks, and reconstructed sections of the Appian Way. To recreate Nero’s burning of Rome, they torched the set, a project that took 24 nights to film, and was visually comparable to the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.
Yet Quo Vadis was snubbed at the Oscars for art direction, which went instead to An American in Paris (and eight years later to Ben-Hur).
32,000 costumes were created for Quo Vadis—the most of any film in history. As Guinness World Records reports:
An estimated 52,000 yards of material went into the costumes, many of which were created specifically for the film’s 30,000 extras and included 15,000 hand-sewn sandals and 13,000 pieces of handmade jewelry. . . . Costume designer Herschel McCoy oversaw a massive workforce which included designers, buyers and hundreds of locally recruited Italian seamstresses.2
Yet the “Costume Design” Oscar went to An American in Paris. Ironically, Ben-Hur won for “Costume Design,” despite most of its costumes being dragged out of MGM’s mothballs from Quo Vadis. How can the borrowing of costumes merit an Oscar, but not their original creation?
Although Miklos Rózsa’s score for Ben-Hur won an Oscar, his original score for Quo Vadis did not. An American in Paris copped a music Oscar, even though its songs were simply re-scorings of melodies written by the Gershwin brothers in the 1920s and 1930s.
Although Quo Vadis was photographed in Italy for authenticity, while An American in Paris was mostly shot on Hollywood sets, it was the latter that brought home the Cinematography Oscar, an honor later accorded to Ben-Hur.
And the “Best Picture” of 1951? That too went to An American in Paris, as it would to 1959’s Ben-Hur.
I’d never seen An American in Paris, whose box-office earnings were only a third of Quo Vadis’s, so I recently watched it for comparison. It’s a musical. About half the movie is song-and-dance routines featuring Gene Kelly’s talents, and occasionally those of Leslie Caron and Oscar Levant. In between the numbers is a rather lightweight plot. Kelly plays a poor street artist pursued romantically by a rich benefactress. He is really in love with a shopgirl (Caron), who loves Kelly, but feels obligated to marry an older benefactor. Predictably, true love prevails in the end.
Here are YouTube-linked clips from Quo Vadis and An American in Paris. See which film sees more memorable and Oscar-worthy:
Premiere magazine listed An American in Paris as one of “The 20 Most Overrated Movies of All Time.”3 It’s difficult to see how it scored six Oscars, including the coveted “Best Picture,” while Quo Vadis, the Ben-Hur of its day, was left flat with none.
There are two factors worth considering here. In the early 1950s, tempers were simmering in Hollywood over the “blacklist.” Gene Kelly was well-known as a very active leftist. His wife, actress Betsy Blair, literally tried to join the Communist Party, but the Party turned her down on the grounds that it might diminish Kelly’s political influence.4 Blair wound up on the blacklist.
That politics were involved with An American in Paris is suggested by IMDb’s comment that the producers rejected Maurice Chevalier for the part of Leslie Caron’s older lover “due to his collaborationist stance during World War II.”5
On the other hand, Robert Taylor, star of Quo Vadis, had ignited the ire of Hollywood leftists by testifying during the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ investigation of Communist infiltration into Hollywood. He said: “I personally certainly do believe that the Communist Party should be outlawed. . . . If I had my way about it, they’d all be sent back to Russia or some other unpleasant place.” You can see Taylor’s comment, along with some from Adolphe Menjou and Ronald Reagan, in this clip.
(I’ve always found it ironic that the Hollywood left, to this very day, expresses outrage over the temporary blacklist—which many writers simply evaded by writing anonymously or under pseudonyms—while shedding no tears for the tens of millions of people Communism exterminated.)
However, I believe there’s a deeper reason why Ben-Hur outscored Quo Vadis 11 to 0 in Oscars wins.
Because the accusation of “antisemitism” is tossed around so arbitrarily these days, I think I should preface my remarks by mentioning that I penned a Christian screenplay in the mid-1990s. It was optioned twice, but never made into a movie. I submitted the screenplay to a well-known Hollywood “script doctor.” A Christian, she warned me regarding the project’s chances: “Jim, you’ve got to remember that Hollywood is a Jewish town.” Anyone who thinks such a remark is “antisemitic” needs only visit Wikipedia’s pages on the major studios—MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Columbia, Fox—and see who founded them.
I believe the main reason for the Oscar dichotomy was this:
• Quo Vadis depicted the Roman persecution of Christians.
• Ben-Hur depicted the Roman persecution of Jews.
In Quo Vadis, Robert Taylor plays Marcus Vinicius, an arrogant Roman general who falls in love with a retired general’s adopted daughter (Deborah Kerr), not knowing she is secretly a Christian. Eventually, after much reluctance, he is drawn to the faith himself. The film graphically portrays the persecution of Christians by Nero (Peter Ustinov) in the Colosseum, with lions released on the victims, and Christians burned at the stake. (An aside on the movie’s authenticity: I became Eastern Orthodox in 2017, and in rewatching the film, I was surprised to hear the Christians sing something heard in our services—the Greek phrase “Κύριε, ἐλέησον,” phonetically pronounced “Kyrie, eleison”—which, translated, means “Lord, have mercy.”)
Ben-Hur, of course, is about a Jewish prince (Charlton Heston) who, along with his family, is brutally persecuted after a tile accidentally falls from their home’s roof, nearly hitting a passing Roman governor.
It’s certainly true that Ben-Hur was subtitled A Tale of the Christ. The film begins with a wordless Nativity scene, and later shows Ben-Hur, enroute to the slave galley, having a touching brief encounter with Christ. And near the film’s end, Ben-Hur witnesses the Crucifixion, after which his mother and sister experience a miraculous healing from leprosy.
The Christian elements are more of a subplot in this 3 and ½ hour movie, however, and after rewatching it, I noticed a distinct omission. The crowd watches the Crucifixion silently. There is none of the jeering the Scriptures describe. One leaves the film impressed that the Romans were Christ’s persecutors. There is no hint that it was the Pharisees who demanded the crucifixion, and that Roman governor Pontius Pilate ordered it with the greatest reluctance. In the movie, Pilate is only seen as the pompous overseer of the impressive but fictional chariot race, his face contemptuous, acknowledging Ben-Hur’s victory with seeming reluctance.
While in no way denying its marvelous production values, Ben-Hur took a step toward furthering public perception that Judaism and Christianity are allies, instead of the traditional enemies they had long been. This paradigm was furthered again by awarding the 1981 “Best Picture” Oscar to Chariots of Fire, another impeccable film that advanced “Judeo-Christianity.” It came on the heels of the 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism hosted by Benjamin Netanyahu and his father, and attended by dignitaries from around the world, including George H. W. Bush. It was no coincidence that the 1979 Academy Awards ceremony conferred the “Best Picture” Oscar on The Deer Hunter, a film launching the portrayal of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam as heroes, after they had been castigated and spit on during the 1960s, with John Wayne’s The Green Berets encountering nationwide protests. In 1979, the time had come to rehabilitate the American soldier’s image, because the Zionist Deep State had a new mission for him: “The War on Terror.”
Examine a “Best Picture” Oscar, and you’ll usually find a geopolitical motive behind it.
NOTES
1. IMDb, Trivia: Quo Vadis, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043949/trivia/?ref_=tt_dyk_trv.
2. “Most Costumes Used in a Film,” Guinness World Records, https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/69773-most-costumes-used-in-a-film?form=MG0AV3&form=MG0AV3.
3. IMDb, Trivia: An American in Paris, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043278/trivia/?ref_=tt_dyk_trv.
4. Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Rocklin, Calif.: Forum, 1998), 63.
5. IMDb, Trivia: An American in Paris, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043278/trivia/?ref_=tt_dyk_trv.
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