Awards and Honors

Ben-Hur was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and winner of 11 (the most awards for a single film up to that point): Best Picture, Director, Actor (Charlton Heston), Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith), Art Direction-Set Decoration (Color), Cinematography (Color), Costume Design (Color), Special Effects, Editing, Music, Sound. The controversy over the writing credit helped prevent Karl Tunberg from winning the adapted screenplay award.

It won Best Film from any Source at the British Academy Awards

Best Foreign Production in the David Di Donatello Awards, the Italian film industry's highest honor.

Other honors for Ben-Hur include:
- Directors Guild of America Outstanding Directorial Achievement Award for William Wyler
- Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture Drama, Director, and Supporting Actor (Stephen Boyd); nomination for Best Actor (Heston)
- A Grammy nomination to Miklós Rózsa for Best Soundtrack Album
- National Board of Review Best Supporting Actor Award (Griffith) and Special Citation to Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt for direction of the chariot race
- New York Film Critics Award for Best Film

- Writers Guild of America nomination for Best Written American Drama to Karl Tunberg, the only name the Guild would allow on the credits
- Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing from the Motion Picture Sound Editors USA

In 2004, Ben-Hur was chosen by the National Film Preservation Board to be one of the movies preserved in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

The film ranked #72 in the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the 100 greatest movies; in the updated (2007) list, it was dropped to #100.

The Critics' Corner: BEN-HUR

"Within the expansive format of the so-called 'blockbuster' spectacle film, which generally provokes a sublimation of sensibility to action and pageantry, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and William Wyler have managed to engineer a remarkably intelligent and engrossing human drama.... Without for one moment neglecting the tempting opportunities for thundering scenes of massive movement and mob excitement that are abundantly contained in the famous novel of Gen. Lew Wallace, upon which this picture is based, Mr. Wyler and his money-free producers have smartly and effectively laid stress on the powerful and meaningful personal conflicts that are strong in this old heroic tale."
– Bosley Crowther, New York Times, November 19, 1959

"Out of this sea of celluloid, a masterful director, William Wyler, has fished a whale of a picture, the biggest and the best of Hollywood's super-spectacles. ... The film has its failures. The movie hero is pretty much an overgrown boy scout who never experiences the moral struggles that beset the hero of the book. Then, too, the story sometimes lags-not, oddly enough, because it is too long but because it is too short. For the final script, M-G-M eliminated an entire subplot that gives the middle of the story its shape and suspense. But the religious theme is handled with rare restraint and good taste. ... The script...is well ordered, and its lines sometimes sing with good rhetoric and quiet poetry. The actors, for the most part, play in the grand manner, but with controlled firmness. ... [Wyler's] wit, intelligence and formal instinct are almost everywhere in evidence, and he has set a standard of excellence by which coming generations of screen spectacles can expect to be measured."
– Time, November 30, 1959

"It is supremely ironic that a director who later claimed that Ben-Hur 'was never intended to be anything more or less than an adventure story with no artistic pretensions at all' should have given the cinema the richest, and perhaps noblest, historical epic of all."
– Derek Elley, The Epic Film: Myth and History (Routledge, 1984)

"Although a bit like a four-hour Sunday school lesson, Ben-Hur is not without its compensations, above all, of course, the chariot race.... The rest is made interesting by the most sexually ambivalent characters sporting togas this side of Satyricon [1969]. When not fondling phallic substitutes, Heston and Boyd gaze admiringly into each other's eyes, but when they fall out––well, hell hath no fury like a closet queen scorned. ... The movie could be trying to say that for some people religion is an escape from their sexuality, but it seems unlikely."
– Scott Meek, Time Out Film Guide (Penguin, 2000)

"The 1959 film is less a tale of the Christ than a spectacle cleverly navigating the political minefields of the day. Its themes include the threatened extinction of the Jews, the value of passive resistance, the evils of informing, and Jewish-Arab solidarity. Hollywood liberalism meets Christian conservatism without rustling anyone's feathers, an achievement more awesome than racing chariots, battling pirates, and vanishing leprosy."
– Gary Giddins, New York Sun, September 27, 2005

Dwight Macdonald in Esquire was one of the very few mainstream critics to pan the film, saying it was like watching a freight train go by and complaining that the story had switched the responsibility for Christ's death from the Jews to the Romans, a remark that earned him about 100 letters of protest and which he retracted, with some qualification, a few years later in his review of King of Kings (1961).

"Big-budget epic is quite watchable, but a bit syrupy once Messala is no longer around. The chariot-race sequence and the sea battle still hold up nicely, but there is nothing else exciting in the picture."
- Danny Peary, Guide For the Film Fanatic

"Lew Wallace's hectic potboiler-classic has everything - even leprosy. M-G-M laid on the cash and William Wyler directed, with several busy assistants...Has anyone ever been able to detect the contributions to the script of Gore Vidal, Christopher Fry, and S. N. Behrman? Could they?"
- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

"Ben-Hur climaxed a wave of religious epics in the 1950s, and I suppose the trend speaks to a real devoutness in the nation. If only those films' directors had anything like vision or faith in their minds. It remains one of the great ironies of film history that Hollywood was making this kind of heavenly-choir bombast at exactly the time when Robert Bresson was directing some of the most genuinely spiritual films ever made...The rare passages of excitement, like the chariot race, are delivered by unit directors Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt. If only they had been given the whole project."
- David Thomson, Have You Seen...?

"One of the great movie spectacles, and a tour de force for its star, Charlton Heston. In remaking the 1927 silent classic, quality-conscious director William Wyler shines the old chestnut up."
- TV Guide

"The most tasteful and visually exciting film spectacle yet produced by an American company."
- Albert Johnson, Film Quarterly

"Spectacular without being a spectacle...not only is it not simple-minded, it is downright literate."
- Saturday Review

"A major motion picture phenomenon."
- Films in Review

compiled by Rob Nixon