Baltimore Star | Breaking Baltimore News Service

Spartacus [DVD]

Screenplay : Dalton Trumbo (based on the novel by Howard Fast)

MPAA Rating : PG-13

Year of Release : 1960

Stars : Kirk Douglas (Spartacus), Laurence Olivier (Marcus Licinius Crassus), Tony Curtis (Antoninus), Jean Simmons (Varinia), Charles Laughton (Gracchus), Peter Ustinov (Lentulus Batiatus), John Gavin (Julius Caesar), Nina Foch (Helena Glabrus)

Despite everything that is good about Spartacus, in many people's minds it will forever remain the one film Stanley Kubrick made as a "gun for hire." Brought in by actor/executive producer Kirk Douglas after he fired the original director, Anthony Mann (El Cid), Kubrick came in when production was already well underway. He was responsible for helming the majority of the film, but it never feels like a Kubrick film. Although he managed to leave a few of his imprints on the finished product, for the most part it looks as though it could have been made by any polished director.

The film tells the story Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), a slave who led a daring revolt in Italy against the Roman Empire about 73 B.C. When the film opens, Spartacus is purchased by Lentulus Batiatus (Peter Ustinov in an Oscar-winning role), a wealthy slave trader who runs a school for gladiators. At this school, the slaves-turned-gladiators are taught to fight each other to the death for the enjoyment of Romans rich and debauched enough to enjoy such a spectacle. At the training school, Spartacus also learns love, when he meets the beautiful British slave girl, Varinia (Jean Simmons).

Finally fed up with being treated like an animal, Spartacus leads a revolt against the guards at the school. They are quickly overrun, and the newly freed gladiators take off through the Italian countryside, gathering numbers as they attack estates, freeing the slaves and pillaging the riches. Their plan is to make it to Southern Italy where they will pay a large group of pirates to sail them far away from the Roman Empire that had enslaved them.

Meanwhile, the film spends a great deal of time showing us the backstage antics of those in power in the Roman Empire, namely the political warfare being waged between a senator with dictatorial ambitions, Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Olivier), and an older, more restrained senator, Gracchus (Charles Laughton). For 1960, the film was decidedly frank about Roman decadence, which gives it an edge that is lacking in too many sword-and-sandal epics of the era. The film contains a great deal of talk about Gracchus' fondness for many women, and he and Batiatus have an amusing conversation about why corpulent men are better people.

However, one key scene with heavy homosexual overtones was cut from the film and later restored to the finished print in 1991. The scene shows Crassus being bathed by his slave, Antoninus (played fairly badly by Tony Curtis). It includes a classic line where Crassus, after asking Antoninus if he likes to eat oysters or snails, says quietly, "My taste includes both oysters and snails," which is a none-too-subtle code for his bisexuality. It is of little surprise that the Production Code Office demanded the removal of this scene, not so much because of the line itself, but because the scene in which it is uttered, shot through sheer curtains with lush music, is so heavily homoeroticized.

Kubrick took two years and a staggering $12 million to make Spartacus, and much of the money was well-spent, especially in the extensive battle scene near the end of the film in which Spartacus' army of slaves faces down the Roman legions. This magnificent staging of two armies facing each other across a plain and the ensuing battle is truly an epic of thousands (Mel Gibson obviously took careful notes before filming Braveheart). Kubrick takes his time establishing the parameters of the battle, giving us long, wide shots of the Roman army marching in perfectly formed columns as they move forward, their numbers seeming to grow each moment as legions separate out and form new columns. The battle that follows is fast and furious, punctuated with quick moments of graphic violence that were removed during most theatrical prints in 1960 (there is one brief, shocking moment when Spartacus hacks off a Roman soldier's arm).

However, like many films from the 1960s, Spartacus is a classic that betrays its age. Some of the hairstyles are decidedly un-Roman (especially the women's, although Kirk Douglas' perfectly styled flattop seems out of place, as well), and several lines of dialogue are wooden and awkward. Still, the film was groundbreaking in many ways, most notably Douglas' decision to hire screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (A Guy Named Joe), one of the blacklisted members of the infamous Hollywood Ten, to pen the screenplay when novelist Howard Fast did not satisfy in his attempts to adapt his own novel. Of course, Trumbo had worked steadily throughout the decade following his year of imprisonment in 1950 for refusing to answer questions and name names at the McCarthy hearings, but he had been denied screen credit because no one wanted to risk being associated with a blacklisted writer. Douglas was one of the first to break the blacklist by giving Trumbo screen credit, which was the beginning of the end of the hysterical McCarthy era.

Spartacus also pushed boundaries with its tragic ending that does not give its audiences a victorious hero, but rather a crucified one whose only salvation is the hope that all his fighting was not in vain. Without its ending, this grand, old-fashioned Roman epic (it runs well over three hours) would be more along the lines of something Cecil B. DeMille might have made. Spartacus still stands out because it has a certain intelligence and underlying political agenda moving beneath its grand Technicolor surface (Trumbo managed to insert several digs at McCarthy, including a reference to Crassus "making lists of the disloyal"). Looking back on the film more than 40 years later, some of Kubrick's resonant themes about dehumanization manage to shine through, especially in the early scenes at the gladiatorial school, which almost serve as a warm-up for the more intense dehumanizing that takes place in the Marine boot camp in Full Metal Jacket (1987).

However, even for those detractors who might feel Kubrick sold out to the Hollywood establishment when he made this film (even once), Spartacus is an undeniably rousing picture. Kubrick's voice may have been muted, but it is there. You just have to listen for it.