A Powerful Indictment of Statist Tyranny; Memorable and Vivid

Rating: 7/10 (18 July 2005)

This is a large-scale movie with fairly good acting, splendid production values and an intelligent script that tends toward socialism and has a few problems at the opening scenes that mitigated its otherwise relentless power Apart from these two problems, it is a film that can be watched many times, it has fine dialogue and is an interesting fictionalized biography throughout. Stanley Kurbrick's direction is generally good, and his habit of mounting historically-accurate sets such as the Roman Senate chamber, Crassus's house, the gladiatorial school of Lentulus Batiatus etc. is a great asset i this case. I found the experience of the film to be quite realistic, despite the necessary telescoping of characters and the introduction of allegorical types. The period of the historical adventure is the youth of Julius Caesar, when Rome was dominated by the party of Marcus Crassus, the mine-owning would-be dictator of Rome; his political opponent in the narrative is the populist Gracchus, a telescoping of the earlier Gracchi brothers who had been executed for trying to end the oligarchy of Rome legally. The other element in the film other than a huge revolt of the slaves of the late Republic, already become totalitarian, is the presence of the Cilician pirate fleets as a thorn in the Republic's leaders' sides. Spartacus, a Thracian, leads the revolt against the empire after escaping with his fellow slaves of the arena from the gladiator school in Capua where they had been being trained; the catalyst for the revolution is a double fight to the death, something they had been promised would not happen to them, staged to please Crassus and his protégé and their two women. Gathering slaves as he goes, Spartacus swiftly hones a gladiator-trained army on the slopes of volcanic Mt. Vesuvius. He takes several cities including the port of Brundusium, but he cannot lay siege to Rome, lacking the machineries to do so; and when he reaches the sea, the pirates with whom he had dealt to buy ships with looted money so he might disperse his men back to their homes have been defeated...there will be no fleet to meet them. The pirate factor offers Spartacus and his leaders escape; Spartacus tells him to go away. Then he leads his men in battle one last time against the army of Crassus. But Lucullus returns from the pirate wars and the slave army is trapped between several forces. They fight bravely but lose a disastrous final battle--and Crassus then offers many men escape from crucifixion if they will give up their leader. Thousands rise up, crying, "I am Spartacus!" as their answer. Crassus recognizes the leader from his prior appearance in the arena and forces him to fight a final duel to the death with his protégé, Antoninus. He kills him, and Antoninus says, "I love you Spartacus--as the father I never had." "I love you," Spartacus tells him, "as the son I will never see." But he does see his son; his wife and Batiatus find him on a cross as they flee Rome, and show him the son who will live free. The music by Alex North is superb, and the cinematography by Russell Metty is very fine. Costumes were created by Bill T, Valles and William Ware Theiss of "Star Trek" fame. Alexander Golitzen did the beautiful production design. The script was adapted by Dalton Trumbo from Howard Fast's rather short novel. Among the actors in Kirk Douglas's mammoth production, accolades should have gone to Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton as the marvelous antagonists in Rome's political death throes as a Republic. Instead a good performance by Peter Ustinov was somehow cited. This is not really an actor's movie, however; since it is played mostly on an adventure level so that those who come off best have medium-sized parts or smaller--such as Charles McGraw as Marcellus the sadistic gladiator-master, Herbert Lom as the Cilician ship-factor, John Gavin as the young Caesar, Joanna Barnes and Nina Foch as the two patrician women, John Dall as Crassus' second, and John Ireland as Crixus, Spartacus's second...Jean Simmons is quite good as Varinia, Spartacus's slave wife; Tony Curtis gives an intelligent try as Antoninus, except for his Brooklyn accent. As Spartacus, Kirk Douglas does very good work except for the two set speeches which his lack of classical training defeats. Ignoring the altruistic gesture that mars the film's grim opening, this is a film being better and better appreciated with time both by critics and by film-goers. And deservedly so in my view.