Perhaps the Greatest Ever Epic

Rating: 9/10 (18 February 2006)

Spartacus, the Roman gladiator who led the slave revolt known as the Third Servile War, has long been a cult hero of the Left. The Communist movement which attempted to seize power in Weimar Germany was known as the Spartacist League, a ballet about him was composed by the Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian and Eastern European countries during the Communist era used to hold mass gymnastic displays known as "spartakiads" in his honour. It is therefore surprising that a Hollywood film about him was made at the height of the Cold War, even though epics on Classical and Biblical themes were highly popular during this period.
The film can be seen as the projection of modern political ideas back to Ancient Rome, but those ideas, however, are not necessarily Communist ones, although the scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo undoubtedly had Marxist sympathies. Certainly, Spartacus is portrayed by Kirk Douglas as a noble idealist, but the ideals he represents are more those of 1776 or 1861-65 than those of 1917. The film does not attempt to analyse Roman slavery in Marxist terms. The rebellion of the slaves is not seen in terms of class struggle, but rather of a revolt against tyranny. The two rival Roman leaders, who try and turn the slave rebellion to their advantage, can be seen as representing two types of Fascist. Gracchus, who talks of Republican freedom but who has no objections to slavery, is a plebeian demagogue of the Mussolini type; Crassus, disgusted by political corruption and hoping to impose his version of order on the state at sword-point, is a patrician soldier more akin to Franco. Spartacus and his followers, by contrast, have no ambition other than that of returning to their homes to live peacefully as free men. Spartacus's conversations with his wife Varinia and his friend Antoninus are not about politics but about the simple pleasures of life- love, poetry, nature.
Most previous epics, even if not based directly on the Bible, had an explicitly Christian theme. "Quo Vadis?", "The Robe" and "Ben-Hur", all linked the history of Rome to the birth of the new religion. "Spartacus" is set some seventy years before the birth of Christ, so cannot be explicitly Christian, but even here there is an implied Christian subtext. (This was not, however, the first epic to deal with Christian themes by implication; "The Egyptian" draws implied parallels between Christianity and the philosophy of the heretical Pharaoh Akhenaten). The film is not always historically accurate, and in one of its deviations from known historical fact, Spartacus does not die in battle, but is captured and crucified. Crucifixion was a common method of execution in Roman times, but today it is such a powerful Christian symbol that it cannot be depicted without evoking the Passion of Christ. Spartacus becomes a symbolic Christ-figure, a man who has been defeated in worldly terms, yet who in death holds out the hope of freedom for others. The famous "I'm Spartacus" scene can be seen, literally, as a demonstration of his men's loyalty to him, and as a symbolic representation of the fact that his ideals live in us all.
The film clearly deals with some weighty intellectual topics, far more so than did the average epic of this period. Fortunately, it is well served by an intelligent script and some equally intelligent performances by most of the main players which enable it to do justice to these themes. This intellectual ambition and the film's well-developed characters, have led to it being held in high regard today, although it was perhaps not so highly regarded when it first came out. It did not, for example, garner nearly so many Oscar nominations as "Ben-Hur" had done the previous year. It did win three technical awards, plus "Best Supporting Actor" for Peter Ustinov, something that has always surprised me because Ustinov's was not the best performance by a supporting actor in 1960. Indeed, it was not even the best supporting performance in "Spartacus" itself; I preferred Charles Laughton's devious Gracchus, a man who finds some dignity and a spark of humanity when he finally realises that he has been outmanoeuvred, and Laurence Olivier's Crassus, whose dignified aristocratic exterior hides a ruthless and cynical nature. Ustinov was much in demand in epic films (he also featured in "Quo Vadis?"and "The Egyptian", but his style of acting seems too mannered to be convincing today. I have never imagined Roman gladiator trainers as obsequious, effete and slightly camp British public schoolboys, which is how Lentulus comes across; I found Oliver Reed's interpretation of a similar role in "Gladiator" much more convincing.
What really surprises me, however, is that there was no "Best Actor" nomination for the upright and dignified Kirk Douglas, no "Best Actress" for the lovely Jean Simmons and no "Best Picture" for the film as a whole. The one thing I did not like about the film was the notorious "snails and oysters" scene which I felt should have remained on the cutting-room floor rather than being restored to the film in 1991. That apart, however, I found this a highly impressive film. Its director Stanley Kubrick appears not to have cared for it too much- his main complaint seems to have been that he was not given the complete artistic control over the project that he later came to take for granted. Films produced by "auteur" directors, however, are not necessarily superior to those made by a studio system, and artists are not always the best judges of their own work. (Tchaikovsky, for example, often undervalued what are today regarded as his greatest compositions). For me, "Spartacus" is perhaps the greatest epic ever made, beating even "Gladiator" and Charlton Heston's trilogy of "The Ten Commandments", "Ben-Hur" and "El Cid", and equal in quality to anything in Kubrick's later work. 9/10