Very famous classic

Rating: 7/10 (25 July 2017)

Just as Ben-Hur is the most famous biblical movie ever, Spartacus is the most famous gladiator movie ever. (Sorry, Russell Crowe.) In 1960, the year after Ben-Hur's spectacular success, producing a three-hour movie about Roman gladiators was risky. Everyone in the audience would be comparing it to Charlton Heston's slavery scenes, so it'd better be good! Well, whether or not you like it, it's remained a classic through the decades.
Spartacus focuses on the treatment and life of slaves, and the dissension within the Roman Empire, rather than copying any Biblical theme from the countless religious movies to come out of the 1950s. There are so many famous scenes and lines that have come out of this movie, it's almost superfluous to give a plot summary or even mention the cast. Briefly, Kirk Douglas plays the title character, an unruly slave who is sent to train as a gladiator. He falls in love with Jean Simmons, and while his fellow slaves turn to him as a leader, he bonds closely with one in particular, Tony Curtis. Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, and John Gavin give very memorable performances as a Roman politician, a slave trader, and Julius Caesar, respectively.
If this is one of the first old movies you've ever seen, you'll form very definite opinions of everyone in the cast that will be hard to shake no matter how many more of their movies you subsequently watch. You'll find it hard to believe Laurence Olivier was once a handsome hero after you see him as such a convincing villain. You won't find Charles Laughton very endearing, and you'll probably wonder why Peter Ustinov won the Oscar for Supporting Actor. Ustinov's character is important to the story, but it's not a very demanding performance, and I have to think this was a long overdue make-up Oscar for his turn in Quo Vadis. It's also puzzling when you find out Kirk Douglas wasn't even nominated, but Alex North's absurd music was. I understand North wanted to conjure the "Roman circus" idea in people's minds, but once he heard what he wrote and realized it wasn't working, he should have come up with something else. It's hard to take a movie, let alone a huge epic, seriously when the music is comical and ill-fitting.
Kirk Douglas pulled out all the stops in his most famous film, and when you see him performing his gladiator training stunts, you'll drop your jaw-and not only because he looks so good. There are rigorous physical scenes that had to be performed take after take without tiring, but there are also tender moments that prove he's "not an animal," a phrase he keeps repeating to his captors. When he falls in love with Jean Simmons, they're repeatedly kept apart as another torture tactic. In one horrible scene, she's thrown into a neighboring prison cell with a gruff brute so Kirk can hear what happens to her and realize he's helpless to stop it. The next morning, he sneaks a private moment with her during breakfast to ask if she's alright. Keep in mind this movie was made in 1960 after the fall of the Production Code. Scenes with implied rape were allowed, as were partial nudity and sexual innuendo.
Spartacus is one of those classics, like Gone with the Wind, that everyone sees at least once in their lifetime. If you have no idea what the phrase "I'm Spartacus!" means, your film education missed a key course. Go rent the movie during your next guys' weekend, and get ready to appreciate the movie that fathered all the modern gladiator movies we know and love.