Ben-Hur Articles

Movie Star Ramon Novarro Brutally Killed Halloween Eve 1968 Paul Ferguson, in a letter he wrote me at the time I was working on Beyond Paradise, blamed his Catholic background for Ramon Novarro's death: "When [Novarro] kissed me, I reacted like a Catholic, what they call homosexual panic. Some old guy in the desert says, 'Kill homosexuals.' It's inbred. . . . I was too [...]

Rex Ingram (top); Barbara La Marr, Ramon Novarro, in Ingram's Trifling Women (bottom) St. Patrick's Day always reminds me of silent-era filmmaker Rex Ingram, among whose silent-era efforts are The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Prisoner of Zenda, Scaramouche, Mare Nostrum, The Magician, and The Garden of Allah, and whose birth — as Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock — took place in Dublin on Jan. [...]

Peter O'Toole, Katharine Hepburn, The Lion in Winter Turner Classic Movies' Christmas daytime programming includes George Cukor's 1933 classic Little Women, the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, and the tedious 1959 version of Ben-Hur. William Wyler was a great director, but this multi-Oscared epic pales in comparison to Fred Niblo's more concise, less pretentious, and (mercifully) dialogue-less 1925 version starring Ramon Novarro (who was [...]

Clara Bow, known as the "It" Girl, stars in the appropriately titled It Part III of Moguls & Movie Stars, A History of Hollywood, "The Dream Merchants," narrated by Christopher Plummer, continues today (a rerun of Monday's presentation) on Turner Classic Movies. Accompanying features and shorts focus on 1920s comedies. Charles Chaplin's The Pilgrim is on right now. Following "The Dream Merchants," TCM will show [...]