Hollywood's greatest Roman epic!!!

Rating: 10/10 (3 October 2002)

Spartacus has become part of pop culture. Its dialogue, characters and some of its visuals have become almost clichéd, so it is hard to imagine a time when the film was far from a sure bet. It was actually a gamble of significant proportions.
Star and project shepherd Kirk Douglas, drawn as he was to martyrs, had had an eye on this story for some time, and now - "now" being circa 1958 - at the peak of his fame and power, he decided to wrestle it into existence. Not one to ever take the easy approach to anything, Douglas secretly entrusted scripting duties to blacklisted scribe Dalton Trumbo (adapting a novel by Howard Fast), landing himself a surprisingly rich and sophisticated epic, the first Roman Epic to bear no mention of the character Jesus.
He then gathered a dizzying cast of powerhouse names: Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov! Any one of those titans could of headed the bill, thus Douglas promptly lied to each one of them, promising them each the biggest part. With legal action and mutiny within reach before cameras even rolled, he chose to go one further - three being the charm - and fired veteran director Anthony Mann. His replacement? Recent Paths of Glory collaborator Stanley Kubrick.
What on paper has the makings of a mad disaster magically morphed into not just a hit and Academy Award Winner, but also the greatest Roman epic of all time. The actors all turned in career-best performances, and while Kubrick was not able to enforce his will as strongly as anywhere else in his filmography, you can argue that having Douglas focusing him on the heart of the story allowed the film to have a heart of its own.
After Spartacus, there was nowhere for the genre to go but down, and down it went with alarming speed, straight to a period of hibernation that lasted until Ridley Scott's Gladiator over three decades later. Despite that recent mega-hit, this is still the one to beat.