Surprisingly excellent.

Rating: 7/10 (23 November 2003)

Surprisingly, because *Spartacus* belongs to that awful genre of the sword-and-sandal epic. (Lately -- and woefully -- revived by that excruciating *Gladiator*.) Surprisingly, because the film was born of many fathers (Dalton Trumbo as screenwriter, Anthony Mann as original director, Stanley Kubrick as replacement about half-way through the production, and Kirk Douglas basically making all of the creative decisions). In other words, *Spartacus* should have been an expensive mess.
But, while imperfect, it's a generally glorious epic, the "thinking man's epic" so many strived for during the Fifties and Sixties. Most of those attempts failed miserably, but this one worked out. Who really knows why. Perhaps it's because this story takes place in Republican Rome, so there are none of those wet-blanket, moon-faced Christians lurking about yet. Or maybe it's because the movie avoids being a tensionless biopic, and instead focuses on the slave rebellion -- which is clearly enough material for a 3+ hour movie, anyway. Perhaps it's the performances, all of them very good, with Peter Ustinov managing to outdo everybody as a nouveau riche dean of a gladiatorial school. In fact, the movie could've used more of Ustinov: the character is such a true-to-life conception that the actor manages to make mincemeat out of Laurence Olivier's bad guy, and even puts Charles Laughton's pompous Senator in the shade (no easy feat, that). Perhaps it's even that infamous scene between Olivier and Tony Curtis. I still aver that watching Tony Curtis bathe and oil a naked Olivier remains one of the most outrageous things you'll ever see in cinema. And that's followed by Olivier demanding of Curtis that the latter should "love Rome as a mother. You must serve her!" ("Rome" being Olivier's Crassus, of course.) Perhaps the greatest scene in the movie is the impromptu gladiatorial match between Douglas' Spartacus and another gladiator played by the ultra-dignified African-American actor Woody Strode. Exciting in and of itself, the scene then becomes poignant social commentary, as Strode hurls his trident at his oppressors up in their luxury box -- food for thought for an audience in the midst of the Civil Rights struggle. And it should be mentioned that the love story between Douglas and Jean Simmons as the slave girl from Britannia is performed with unusual sensitivity, backed up by a lovely score.
The "Kubrick touch" in all of this is rather hard to discern, except perhaps in the Olivier/Curtis scene and in certain points of visual composition. Kubrick's ready-steady, static camera style gets the most out of the grand, climactic battle near the end of the picture. But Kubrick-worshipers would do well to remember that about half of this movie belongs to Anthony Mann, and in any case, ALL of it belongs to Kirk Douglas. A purely Kubrick film would doubtless have been worse. On the other hand, I also suspect that the marvelously downbeat finale would not have existed without the dour Kubrick's insistence. *Spartacus* is probably the only sword-and-sandal epic without the mushy Christian uplift, the "spiritual happy ending", despite the overt Christian symbolism in the final shots. Kubrick's meanness proves to be a bracing tonic in this otherwise sappy genre.