The 1960 epic Spartacus is still the most mature of the sword-and-sandal spectaculars; more politically sophisticated than Ben Hur and more witty (“It would take a great woman to make Crassus fall out of love with himself”; “In Rome dignity shortens life even more surely than disease”).
It made an icon of Kirk Douglas with his sword, not to mention a still-spoofed catchphrase. “I am Spartacus . . .”, “I am Spartacus . . .” But it creaks at times with the competing visions of its star, writer and director.
Taken from the 1951 novel by Howard Fast, who started writing it while in jail for allegedly un-American activities, the story of the slaves’ revolt in Ancient Rome was developed by Douglas as a parable of Israeli independence. His influence in the film is jarringly evident in the montages of liberated slaves thriving with their new kibbutz-style lifestyle.
Douglas has written proudly that he used this $12 million epic to smash the Hollywood blacklist of left-wingers by using the exiled writer Dalton Trumbo, but the idealism bears as many traces of the mighty vanity project. In one scene, Jean Simmons actually looks up at Douglas and sighs: “You know things that can’t be taught.”
The result would probably have been closer to Douglas’s previous sword-waving hit, The Vikings, if he hadn’t fired the director Anthony Mann in the first week. “It’s not working out,” he announced to his co-star, Peter Ustinov.
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Stanley Kubrick was brought in because Douglas thought he could control the 31-year-old director. This proved to be a major miscalculation, as Kubrick exhibited a refusal to compromise newly found since he and Douglas had worked together on Paths of Glory (1957). He balked at the sentimental sermonising in the script and stripped Douglas’s dialogue in the first half-hour to two lines.
The laconic first section in the gladiator school is actually the most effective, building the injustices and degradations until Spartacus snaps and revolts.
Even though Kubrick later distanced himself from the film, it is uncanny how much of the basic material fitted with what became career-long preoccupations: the dehumanising effect of martial training and the inherent corruption of power. The gladiator training might as well be the first half of Full Metal Jacket, with its systematic eradication of feeling and the inevitable human malfunction that results.
The story loses all of its pressure-cooker tension when the slaves overthrow their masters. Instead of piling on the dangers for the escaped slaves, the story fans out to show the effect of the revolt across the layers of Roman society.
This is not without its pleasures. The senate floor and the sunken bath are natural homes for the peacock style of heavyweights such as Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton.
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Then, just when the political subplots, body servant initiations and frolicking slave montages begin to coagulate,the narrative rallies brilliantly. A betrayal leaves Spartacus and his army no choice but to march and face Rome for the final battle. It is an all-or-nothing finale, an eight-minute bloodbath with a satisfying aftermath full of sombre ironies for everyone — barring, oddly, Spartacus.
Douglas’s concept of Spartacus as a brawny noble primitive never quite shakes off the actor’s matinée idol roots. He starts off defiant but pure and ends up pretty much the same way. Simmons similarly starts off proud and defiant and never wavers, which may explain why their two later love scenes are so cloying.
Spartacus has one scene where he expresses doubts, which makes him more human, but he is not undone by any flaw. He is simply outnumbered by the Roman army. Thus he suffers a martyr’s fate without fear: “Death is the only freedom a slave knows. That’s why he’s not afraid of it.”
This lends itself more to propaganda or melodrama, when great drama should stretch to the poignancy of belated self-realisation. Spartacus gains only the knowledge that his son will be raised a free man to show that his death will not be in vain. It is still stirring, but the result is an epic tale that winds up falling short of the full weight of classical tragedy.
All the moral climaxes are to be found among the surrounding characters, such as Laughton’s venal senator.
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