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This 1960 movie is one of those classics I’m willing to bet most people under the age of 60 have never watched but still feel they know all about. I admit I was one of them until the other day. Let me say upfront, I don’t really see the whole Spartacus as Christ thing, any more than I do for Neo in The Matrix trilogy; if this were so than the same would be true of the hero of nearly any straightforward epic story. But some people want to see such things anywhere they can.
Spartacus is a slave born a few decades before the aforementioned Christian savior in a north African Roman colony, where he’s spotted by gladiator trainer (Peter Ustinov, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) and taken to Italy. Life is easier in Capua than in a Libyan mine but he still chafes under the rules and constraints imposed by his masters.
Then one day two leading Roman senators (Lawrence Oliver as the patrician Crassus and John Gavin as a young Juius Caesar) and their lady friends turn up at the school unexpectedly and want a show. The sniveling master is happy to oblige until the women insist the gladiators fight to the death, as is custom in Rome; he tries to convince them that doing so in the school would be a really bad idea but the arrogant women want what they want.
One shortcoming of Dalton Trumbo’s script for me is that Crassus never really understands that what he and his friends did that afternoon was the inciting incident of everything that came after, including his own downfall, the death of tens of thousands and the rise of Caesar. Even at the very end, when Crassus realizes who Spartacus is (since all the men captured with him famously stand up and say “I am Spartacus”), there’s no light of recognition.
Still, this is one of the best performances Kirk Douglas gave, Olivier is as terrific as ever, Ustinov is a very good shifty, sniveling, out for his own good Roman plebe, Jean Simmons is wonderful as Varinia, the Brittanic slave who immediately falls for Spartacus (and vice versa, to be sure), Charles Laughton punches his weight as Crassus’s populist political opponent and John Ireland a strong right arm to Douglas.
The movie was also a triumph for writer Dalton Trumbo. He was nearly destroyed by the McCarthy blacklist, the most prominent member of the Hollywood 10, and Spartacus was the first credit he got after that dark era ended. He worked for another decade after this, giving us the scripts for Exodus and Papillon before passing away in 1976.
This film was also the first really big hit directed by Stanley Kubrick, whose next four pictures were the phenomal Lolita, Doctor Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick realized the epic scope of his story required grandiose outdoor settings but he skillfully navigated the line between tasteful and the campiness embraced by contemporaries like Cecille DeMille. He didn’t shy away from visuals that studio execs probably objected to, such as the crucifixions of the captured rebels which lined the army’s road back to Rome.
recommended
