Rome is no example but a slave society

Rating: 10/10 (21 April 2011)

This film of the young Kubrick is of course rather simple in subject and inspiration. What's more Kubrick was following the fashion of the big peplum films that were both long (two parts) and of biblical or Roman inspiration in his time. Kubrick wants to propose us a cinematographic opera with an overture and a musical piece between the two parts with nothing on the screen, that is to say the curtain down and probably slowly rising at the end.
Apart from that the means and the subject are rather banal in our minds, and yet Kubrick is already pushing his footprint on the story. He insists as no one has done before him on the slavery society the Roman empire was, in which some 80% of the population were slaves and nothing but slaves on which their owners had all rights to exploit them, punish them even for fun or even kill them for the pleasure of one's senses, the revulsion, the sickness watching one man killing another can bring in your stomach or the sadistic pleasure of killing someone and cutting him up into pieces.
We have quite the opportunities, in fact many opportunities to check on the practice of crucifixion in Roman society both in long lines of such crucified slaves and on the close up vision of Spartacus on his own cross. The method used here is both cruel and effective, the legs dangling pull on the body and the arms ties to the cross in three places each make breathing more difficult and lead to rather fast lack of oxygen and some more or less comatose state.
This realistic vision, these realistic details are shown over and over and the division of the Roman society is really in two classes of people: the ruling minority that is sadistic and cruel and only interested in their possessions and interests on one side, and the slaves on the other side and most of the time the punishment or crucifying of slaves is a spectacle for the mass of the slaves themselves that are walking in front of them and are thus reminded how fragile their life is in the hands of their masters.
In between these two classes, the legions, the soldiers who are in fact most of the time indentured people, temporary slaves who can suffer at the hands of their officers the same fate as gladiators or slaves at the hands of civilian masters.
That's by far the best element in that film and that's the signature of Kubrick himself. Then the story is banal in its very dramatic tragic dimension. Slaves, here gladiators trained to fight and kill, refuse to be animals any more and go on killing one another on command and they spearhead a rebellion of slaves. Of course gladiators are good fighters and can easily defeat professional soldiers especially when the officers consider the enemy are nothing but slaves in their segregative arrogance.
But to defeat whole armies you need more than a few gladiators and you need a lot of training and know how, and simple slaves do not have that training and that training cannot come overnight. They are thus bound to be defeated and they all are condemned to die on the battle field or be crucified along the roads to serve as examples to fellow slaves and fodder to the birds who will get their eyes long before the crucified person is dead.
Kubrick adds to that some melodramatic love and even a child who will be generously freed by some master of the mother. That's just the spoonful of sugar that is supposed to make the drama pass in your throat without strangling or choking you, but it is also used by Kubrick to emphasize the death of Spartacus on his cross seeing his woman and his child walk away, free but for how long? That's probably what is best in this film, the way Kubrick uses standard Hollywood means and styles and methods to amplify the message: all these Roman and Greek free and democratic models from Antiquity are nothing but barbaric slave countries and societies. He even adds some innuendo about how the masters could use the male slave sexually if they just wanted to. That was part of the "job" for both male and female slaves to be used for the pleasure of their masters that could lead to the small death or the big death on the spur of the moment's inspiration of the master. That too could be seen as some "avant-garde" detail in 1960. But can we say Kubrick produced a spaghetti peplum? I am not sure.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU