Larger than life
EVERYTHING about Ben-Hur (World, 9.30pm) was enormous, specifically Charlton Heston's ego, but also the cost. The producers ran up a bill of US$4 million making it, more than double the going rate for a film at the time.
The arena housing the famous chariot race - the bit everyone remembers about the film, perhaps because much of the rest of it is barely above average - was the biggest set built in film history, its stands packed with 8,000 extras and its floor dusted with 40,000 tonnes of sand from American beaches. Scores of Yugoslavian horses were imported for the race, which took three months to shoot. A number of the horses died during filming, but you won't see that mentioned in many of the film guides.
We would waste a whole day talking of Ben-Hur trivia. Did you know, for instance, that Rock Hudson, Marlon Brando and Burt Lancaster were all preferred choices for the lead, but turned it down. That studios in Rome, Italy (as opposed to Wisconsin) were pillaged for more than a million props? And that there is allegedly a horrible mistake during the chariot race, with a red sports car visible on the horizon? I suspect this is another one of those 'Elvis is working in my local branch of Giordano' stories, but am ready and willing to be proved wrong.
TWO hours long, with loud 'epic' music off-screen and as many sub-plots as you are ever likely to find in one place, Tombstone (Pearl, 9.30pm) slips confidently into the legend of Wyatt Earp. We've been here before at least 10 times - and that's just in the movies. There was also Wyatt Earp on television. The earliest Earp was in 1931 and the best, arguably, Henry Fonda in 1946 (in John Ford's My Darling Clementine ). In this one Kurt Russell looks suitably responsible and troubled. Val Kilmer, the latest Batman, is simply magnificent as 'Doc' Holliday, the unreliable alcoholic consumptive.
WATCHING Pointman (World, 8.30pm) I can't help but wonder how it ever came to be made. It has that schoolboyish and faintly sexist quality of detective series of the 70s, in which the aesthetics of a girls' legs were more important than story or characterisation. You can almost hear the sound of frustrated menfolk getting excited every time another young lovely wanders into shot, which is often.
Jack Scalia, as a rather unsavoury hero (a Wall Street trader wrongly convicted of fraud who spent years in prison and should have stayed there) tries to keep his tongue firmly in his cheek, despite temptations to do otherwise. The stories are a variation on 'beautiful young daughter of murdered businessman asks for protection from mafia'.