Spartacus (1960)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Film Review

A titanic struggle of wills, in which one unbending individualist takes on the might of a formidable opponent in the name of freedom and fails, and where insuperable egos vie for supremacy amid an environment of mistrust, intolerance and thwarted ambitions.  This résumé might equally well describe the troubled production history of this film as the story it tells.  Spartacus is an odd digression in the filmmaking career of Stanley Kubrick, the only film he did not himself initiate and the only one that resembles a conventional Hollywood film.  Kubrick, a consummate auteur, found the experience of working on this film so restricting that afterwards he vowed never again to put himself in the Hollywood straitjacket; for the remainder of his career, he would stay where he belonged, squarely in the driving seat. 

Spartacus may have been loathed and disowned by Kubrick, it may lack his trademark cynicism and wild artistic indulgences, but it is far from being a dismal failure.  In fact it stands as one of the better examples of the sword and sandals epics - intelligently scripted (by a blacklisted Dalton Trumbo), well paced, and enlivened by some of the juiciest performances you can expect to find in a film of this kind.  The film garnered four Oscars:  Peter Ustinov was the recipient of the award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (the only occasion an Oscar would go to an actor in a Kubrick film); it also won awards for Best Art Direction, Cinematography and Costume Design for a colour feature.
 
Kirk Douglas not only took the lead role in Spartacus (playing to his strengths as the butch hero of few words and an unassailable moral integrity) but was the film's executive producer, himself making a sizeable contribution to its colossal 12 million dollar budget.   The story goes that Douglas was so upset when William Wyler cast Charlton Heston instead of him for the lead in Ben-Hur that he committed himself to making an even bigger historical epic.  David Lean was Douglas's first choice to direct the film, but when Lean turned him down he hired Anthony Mann, a seasoned director with some notable screen credits under his belt.   It soon became apparent that Mann's vision of the film failed to match up to that of his paymaster and at the end of the first week of shooting Douglas dismissed him.  Mann was quickly replaced by Stanley Kubrick, an up-and-coming young filmmaker who had recently directed Douglas in Paths of Glory (1957).

Right from the word go, Kubrick found himself in conflict with his producer and technicians.  He had great reservations over the screenplay but failed to persuade Douglas to commission a complete rewrite.  He then sacked his cinematographer Russell Metty and added set lighting and camera direction to his other responsibilities (Metty was still credited and would, ironically, receive the Oscar for Best Cinematography).  Kubrick's obsessive need to assume complete artistic control of the project would create ructions that made Spartacus a fraught and unhappy production for virtually everyone involved.  The battles we seen on the screen are nothing compared with the battles that went on off screen, if the first hand accounts are to be believed.  In addition to the daily wrangles between Kubrick and Douglas and his technicians, there was also a fair amount of conflict in the acting ranks.  The mutual loathing that Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton convey in their scenes together isn't simulated; they genuinely did hate working together and would never have agreed to appear in the film if Douglas had not employed a little subterfuge in casting them.  

In the light of these backstage skirmishes, it is perhaps something of a miracle that Spartacus stands up as well as it does.  The film may fall somewhat short of the all-round excellence of Ben-Hur but its visual impact is almost as great, and it is hard not to be moved by its powerful depiction of one man's crusade against tyranny.  The only significant flaw is that Douglas's love scenes with Jean Simmons fail to ring true.  Kubrick felt that some of these scenes were too sentimental and so had the dialogue removed; unfortunately, he merely rendered them even more toe-curlingly mawkish.  In addition, the battle sequences are less impressive than they deserve to be, their impact undermined by the cumbersome Technirama equipment, which placed severe restrictions on the degree of camera movement.  Although the action scenes are well choreographed, they are painfully static.

Spartacus was a huge commercial success on its first release, yet when it was re-released in 1967 it was cut by 23 minutes.  In 1991, the film was restored, with some additional scenes that had been removed prior to its first release.  The best known of these resurrected sequences is the famous oyster-eating scene in which Crassus makes overt sexual advances to his slave Antoninus.  The sound track having been lost, the dialogue had to be re-dubbed by Tony Curtis and Anthony Hopkins, the latter giving a faultless imitation of Laurence Olivier (who died a few years before).  In its newly restored format, Spartacus is a sumptuous epic that effectively marries the genius of Kubrick with the unbridled resources of Hollywood, a lavish production that resounds with humanity and cinematic bravado.

Film Synopsis

In 73 BC, Spartacus is an anonymous slave worker, toiling in the mines of Libya, when he is bought by Lentulus Batiatus, a man who trains and sells gladiators for profit.   The rugged Thracian shows great promise and is shipped to Capua, where he is subjected to the brutal regime of Batiatus's training camp.  A wealthy patrician, Marcus Licinius Crassus, coerces Batiatus into arranging a private gladiatorial contest for him at the camp.  After two of the gladiators are killed in this contest, Spartacus goads the others into rising up and taking control of Capua.  When news of this revolt reaches Rome, Crassus and his political rival, senator Sempronius Gracchus, each acts to turn the situation to his own advantage.  Crassus sees this as an opportunity to fulfil his political ambitions and become an all-powerful dictator, but Gracchus is determined to thwart him.  Meanwhile, word of Spartacus's success has spread widely, encouraging many thousands of slaves to join him.  With Spartacus's army growing stronger by the day, Crassus conceives a plan to defeat him, a plan that cannot fail...