On 4K UHD - David Hare recommends "the 4K of the year" - BEN HUR (William Wyler, USA, 1959)

Another recent release is Warner's huge and vastly gorgeous, manifestly detailed new 4K two disc (Plus third BD extras disc) steelbook set of 1959's Ben Hur, directed by the great William Wyler with a superb score (some think his best) from Miklos Rosza, second unit direction by the great Yakima Canutt for the Chariot Race and a cast of thousands including grand muscle and toga work from Chuck Heston and Stephen Boyd.

On those two let's remind ourselves of second string writer Gore Vidal (one of at least four more) on outlining the motivation for the two old adolescent friends, Judah (Heston) and Messala (Boyd) now reuniting after a youthful love affair only to be ripped apart by Judah's monotheistic zealotry. The first embrace has Heston literally slathering and drooling over Messala's neck. This barely concealed queerness gets another huge workout in the late Act 1 galley slave sequence when Jack Hawkins, fresh from The Bridge on the River Kwai takes to adopting Chuck as his "son" (one word for it) , fortuitously indeed as this grace and favour ultimately leads the "hero" into getting the rounds of a lifespan to shadow his near invisible contemporary, Jesus Christ. The movie darts around the religiosity very nicely but that's Wyler for you. A total expert at extracting the essences of narrative from the acres of flowery prose in the original novel.

Whatever else you want to make of it the show is genuinely epic with absolutely expert, tight direction from Wyler who stuck with the seemingly unwieldy 2.65 Aspect Ratio of the new Metro65 anamorphic 70mm format which manages to set everything up basically from (rarely) full wide to medium wide to occupy the focal depth with detail of importance while the script blocks and stages the players with long takes and very great, limpid technique. Wyler has a very attractive tic, not noticed by me previously, of doing edits from wider to closer shots of the same actor while speaking or listening to animate what Gore Vidal and the other credited and uncredited writers kept of the original thousand pages Lew Wallace nightmare.

The movie, I must confess has the very grand status of having introduced me to my first stirrings of homosexuality as a boy child, in particular the raft scene with Chuck and Jack Hawkins cut loose from the wreckage on the Roman barge. Hawkins and me both could not get enough of Chuck's very fine figure at this stage of his career (the year after he got Welles the gig to make Touch of Evil at Universal.) If anyone could ever be said to have tamed a performance of range and sublety out of Chuck, it was Wyler.

All the cast members are right, and fine, even Dame Frank Thring, late of Melbourne, playing Balthasar as a screaming dinner party queen. It works. He works, and everyone around him works with it. Even in his first shot and dialogue Thring manages to eyeball-undress Chuck and lick him remotely from top to toe in five seconds of screen time.

Movies like this don't get made any more. They're actually too sophisticated and the audiences are no longer there to really "get" them.

I recommend this as 4K of the year so far.