If you guessed Ben-Hur, you were right, and it's as good time as any to talk of Ben-Hur, because that cinematic opus is 40 this year. Yet age has not diminished the three-hour, 42-minute movie's most incredible achievement: these days, when special effects trickery rules, it is hard to believe that the justly famous chariot race, crashes and all, was actually staged in a giant Roman arena - one of the largest sets ever built - with real chariots, real horses, and real people.

But there is more. Ben-Hur took years of planning, over a full year of filming, and cost a then-unheard-of $15 million. What could have been a disaster was a roaring success. The drama broke box office records (grossing $80 million worldwide on its first release), saved its financially ailing studio, single-handedly revived a genre (Biblical epics became the rage for the next four years), and won a record 11 Academy Awards (matched only last year by another sweeping epic, 1997's Titanic). More recently, the movie was named to the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest American films of all time.

Yet Ben-Hur is remarkable for another reason: unlike other spectacles that came before it, the story is intimate, with an unusual protagonist among its diverse cast of characters: a complex, hate-filled hero bent on revenge, who is both admirable and deplorable.

The movie, set primarily in 33 A.D., is the tale of a Jewish prince, Judah Ben-Hur (Heston), and his boyhood friend, a Roman soldier named Messala (Stephen Boyd), who feud over the Romans' treatment of the Jews and eventually fight it out to the death in a chariot race. Like many epics, the saga is episodic: Judah is convicted of a crime he didn't commit; on his way to punishment, he meets Jesus; he then spends three years as a galley slave, fights in a mighty sea battle, becomes a Roman citizen and famous charioteer, takes on Messala, rescues his family from a leper colony, and witnesses the events leading up to the crucifixion of Christ.

The story is based on a novel by General Lew Wallace, a Civil War general, diplomat, and governor of New Mexico, who spent eight years writing what he subtitled a "Tale of the Christ" (novelist Gore Vidal once observed, however, that "it was not a tale of the Christ, at all. It was the tale of a Roman boy and a Jewish boy"). The massive novel eventually became a best-seller, reportedly selling 50,000 copies a year. "He was the spiritual father of the Hollywood Roman epic," says critic George MacDonald Fraser in The Hollywood History of the World, "and revived the popularity of the chariot race as mass entertainment."

The book was sold to the stage in 1899, with the highlights of the theatrical version being the contractual depiction of Christ as a shaft of light and a race featuring live horses. According to historian Jan Herman, "Judah and Messala drove horses and chariots across stage on a giant treadmill. A painted canvas backdrop rolled in the opposite direction behind them to set the illusion of laps being run." (Because it was live, Messala actually won once, although the actors pretended that he had lost.) The play ran for 20 years.

The first movie adaptation, made in 1907, was 15 minutes and unauthorized, using members of the Brooklyn Fire Department. The first official version was shot in 1925 by the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ramon Navarro starred as a wimpy Ben-Hur and a third of the epic was actually shot in Italy (a sea battle in the Mediterranean used full-sized galleys, one of which burst into uncontrolled flames). The most noteworthy sequence was, naturally, the chariot race, during which 100 horses reportedly died.

The 1925 Ben-Hur was a huge success, so much so that when a financially struggling MGM needed a savior in the mid-'50s, it looked no further than Wallace's novel. To shoot it, MGM rented the Cinecitta Studios in Rome. "It looked very much like an American studio," observes Heston in his autobiography, "which is not surprising: Mussolini had sent his son to Hollywood to get an idea of what a studio should be when he'd planned it in the thirties."

MGM chose William Wyler as director, an unlikely choice since he was best known for his character-based stories (Jezebel, These Three, Wuthering Heights, and The Best Years of Our Lives). But Wyler was just finishing a sweeping, yet intimate, Western called The Big Country, and producer Sam Zimbalist thought Wyler would bring the right touch. Zimbalist was looking for a thinking man's action story.

Wyler (who once quipped, "It takes a Jew to make a really good movie about Christ") picked his Ben-Hur from the cast of The Big Country: Charlton Heston (runners-up: Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, and Kirk Douglas). Heston was no stranger to epics, having starred as Moses in 1956's The Ten Commandments (he was mobbed on arriving in Rome with crowds chanting, "It is Moses!"). But he saw Judah as a more believable, complex individual.

The script, credited to Karl Tunberg, was actually heavily rewritten, first by Gore Vidal, and then, primarily, by British playwright Christopher Fry. Fry's "changes were seldom structural," recalls Heston in his memoirs, "but almost always stylistically crucial, such as changing, 'You didn't like the food?' to 'The meal did not please you?'...Every scene he touched was the better for it."

Vidal claims to have included a key subtextual ingredient that helps to explain Messala's burning hatred for Judah. "There is something emotional between these two, which is not stated and which blows the fuse in Messala," the writer tells Jan Herman in A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director William Wyler. "He is spurned [by Ben-Hur], so it's a love scene gone wrong."

The most spectacular sequence of all, the chariot race, was not crafted by any of them, however. It was choreographed by second unit director Andrew Marton and stunt coordinator Yakima Canutt. According to Herman, the chariot race was the most expensive footage in the movie. The $1 million sequence took five weeks to shoot over a three-month period. "Marton pre-shot the race with doubles and spliced the sequence together to make one continuous sequence," Herman reported. He then showed it to Heston and Boyd, asking them to recreate many of the sequences in close-up. For over a month, Heston spent at least two hours a day on track learning how to guide a chariot.

The most daring stunt was unplanned. Although Heston's chariot was supposed to leap over the wreckage of another chariot, an unexpected bounce caused stunt driver Joe Canutt to be flipped in the air and between the horses.

"I thought he was a dead man," says Heston in his autobiography. "The chariot weighed half a ton, with steel-rimmed wheels sure to cut him in half, or at least cripple him...He dropped the reins, grabbed the front of the chariot, turned and dropped to a handstand on the tongue behind the running team, then flung himself clear." A close-up shot was later filmed showing Heston climbing back into the moving chariot.

The race may have been difficult; but so was the rest of the movie. Herman notes that the company worked six days a week, with Wyler logging in 12 to 14 hours daily. "From the beginning, we knew it would be a tough shoot. So it by God was; I think the toughest I've ever done," recalls Heston, who did 16 takes of one line ("I'm a Jew") for his demanding director. The actor also spent days rowing in a hot ship's galley, leading Heston to quip: "I want to get back home, but I'm damned if I thought I'd be rowing all the way."

Actor Jack Hawkins, playing a Roman, was equally exhausted: "When we were working under the boiling Italian sun and the temperature was in the 90s, I had to wear almost 50 pounds of armor. How those sailors of ancient Rome ever stood up, much less fought a battle, I'll never know." Producer Sam Zimbalist, who had worked on the movie longer than anyone, died of a heart attack before the film's completion.

The movie did not stint on sets. According to Herman, the arena for the chariot race stretched across 18 backlot acres. There were 1,500-foot straightaways and a 10-foot high central island with four giant statues, each 30 feet high. "The arena was the largest set and single largest set built for a Hollywood picture," reports the writer, using a million pounds of plaster, 40,000 cubic feet of lumber, 250 miles of metal tubing, and 40,000 tons of white sand. A track of identical size was built next door to train the horses.

For all that spectacle, however, Ben-Hur ultimately succeeds because of its message. Unlike such campy epics as The Ten Commandments or The Robe (1951), the film's religious and historic events are merely trimmings to help focus the story on its theme, the danger of becoming what you hate.Ben-Hur, despite its many plotlines, is actually about two very simple issues: the transforming effect of hatred and the forgiving power of love. Its source novel, the play, and the earlier screen version were overtly religious. The 1959 Ben-Hur's is much more appealing, however, because its hero is no plaster saint, but a flawed, obsessed man. Although he is kept alive by his hatred of Messala, he is finally made whole by love. "Forgiveness is greater and love is more powerful than hatred," warns one character. And, whatever the age, whatever the audience, that message is universal. Of course, it also helps that Judah drives one mean chariot.