A Great Movie Due To Its Romantic Ideals

Rating: 9/10 (19 June 2005)

Did you know that Karl Marx hero was Spartacus ? There's something deeply ironic about this because the film version of SPARTACUS has so many Marxist ideals it could have been subtitled " THE STORY OF AN ENLIGHTENED PROLETERIAN HERO " As film buffs may know the screenwriter of SPARTACUS Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted by the Hollywood studio system because of alleged communist sympathies and it's impossible not to notice that Trumbo has done a sort of leftist inversion of John Ford's " Always make the legend " mantra . As a history lesson SPARTACUS is rather poor , if you look up the goofs on this page you'll notice that no one has really bothered to their home work as to the history , politics and machinations of ancient Rome with perhaps the most striking piece of speculation is the myth that Spartacus was from a Greek province sold into slavery when it's far more likely he was a Roman legionnaire who was sent to gladiator school but I guess the being sold into slavery makes for a better story
But this very simplistic black and white view of history can be forgiven because it's what makes SPARTACUS a great movie , we know who the bad guys are and why they're bad guys ( They're rich and cruel ) and we know who the good guys are and why they're good guys ( They're poor but noble ) and therefore the audience know instantly whose side they're on SPARTACUS is also a film famous because its director Stanley Kubrick supposedly hated it mainly down to the fact that he didn't have any involvement in the screenplay . What ? A director dislikes a movie of this standard ? I'm certain Spielberg or Scorsese would have killed to make a movie this good . It contains fine performances from all the cast but the stand outs are Douglas , Simmons , Laughton ( Someone else alleged to have had leftist sympathies ) Olivier and Ustinov , so many fine actors in one movie and you don't notice how many different accents used until it's pointed out to you . Check out those battle scenes at the end and remember this was long before CGI so these were real people making up the slave and Roman armies but for me the greatest scene of the film and one of the most haunting scenes I have ever seen is where Woody Strode and Kirk Douglas sit facing each other waiting to go into the arena . What makes it even more spellbinding is that there's no dialogue at all , we only hear the sounds of the previous contestants fighting to the death
Without doubt a movie that deserves to be in the IMDb Top 250 Movies list and possibly Kubrick's best film , he certainly didn't make anything as good as this ever again . But it's a movie that was ignored for most of the major awards at that years Oscar nominations . I guess that because the Oscars are a celebration of American film making talent they didn't want to give awards to movies celebrating communist heroes