A great director serves up spear-and-toga propaganda

Rating: Null/10 (18 May 2004)

Keep your finger on the fast-forward button. The basic story (only sticking with the facts occasionally) is great, but Kubrick added so much boring "color" that much of this well-meaning movie is unwatchable. A sappy and implausible love story burdens the movie almost from the beginning. Part of the problem is that the lovely Jean Simmons was utterly miscast as a pretty and prim slave girl in love with ruff n' tuff Kirk Douglas. The other is that these characters, after staring interminably into each others pupils, deliver some of the schmaltziest lines in the history of film.
Every time the plot gets going, it's interrupted with hundreds, nay thousands, of quick cuts showing Spartacus' brave and happy escaped slaves enjoying their newly won freedom: men working, cute children playing, women washing, Tony Curtis leading a singalong around the campfire, and so on. Liberal as I am, this stuff has the odor of leftist propaganda. Worse, because it's so staged, it's meaningless as film. You don't believe it for two seconds.
Along the same apologetic lines is the seeming beneficence of Spartacus' slave army. In real life, he celebrated a victory by pitting 300 captives against one another in gladiatorial contests. Here, he hates that stuff and will have nothing to do with it. In real life, his troops raped and pillaged, burning farms and slaughtering their occupants. Here, he steals a few trunks of jewelry and other valuables. In this film, there isn't much truth telling going on.
And let's not forget the costuming and makeup. In keeping with the 50s provenance of the film, Kirk Douglas wears a ducktail hairdo. (You expect him to pull up in a lowered '50 Merc. The women's rigid, metallic coifs are doused with shiny hairspray. It all looks very un-Roman.
Mercifully, the film is saved by some mighty fine acting. The supporting cast is spectacular, especially Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton, who, as far as I'm concerned, is the star of the movie. And Ustinov certainly deserved the academy award he got for his role as a likable trainer of gladiators.
Worth seeing, but don't put down the remote.
Note to reviewers: This story didn't take place during the time of the Roman Empire, which began with Augustus in 14 BCE. The Empire was preceded by the Republic. That's when the slave revolt took place in southern Italy.