Word: messala
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...work had been running 21 years, had been seen by 20 million fans, had grossed $10 million. In 1926, M-G-M turned it into the first of the cinemammoths, a $4,000,000, two-hour spectacle starring Ramon Novarro as Ben-Hur and Francis X. Bushman as Messala. By 1936, the film had grossed almost $10 million, and the book had become the biggest bestseller (more than 2,000,000 copies) in U.S. history, not counting the Bible...
...best of Hollywood's super-spectacles. The story of Ben-Hur is reasonably faithful to the general's stirring "Tale of the Christ." Prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a rich Jew born about the same time as Christ, falls out with his childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd), commander of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, who demands that Ben-Hur inform against other Jewish patriots. When Ben-Hur refuses, Messala condemns him to certain death as a galley slave and shuts up his mother (Martha Scott) and sister (Cathy O'Donnell) in a pestilential dungeon...
Except for his 1926 appearance as Messala, Ramon Novarro's competition in the Ben-Hur chariot race, and a brief bit in Wilson, Bushman never appeared on the screen again. But in the last 16 years he has played 2,500 bit parts in just about anything radio had to offer, from Red Ryder to One Man's Family...
Francis Xavier Bushman, 60-year-old matinee idol, got his first good film part in 15 years-playing Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch in the forthcoming Wilson. Bushman was a feverish Romeo in Hollywood's first Shakespeare (1916), a furious Messala in Ben Hur (1923), claims to have made and spent...