Spartacus
Stanley Kubrick (1960)
Spartacus is a unique Stanley Kubrick film in two, connected ways. First, it’s his only feature that he didn’t develop ab initio but was hired to direct (after David Lean turned the project down and Anthony Mann was fired after the first week of shooting). Second, it’s a famous picture that plenty of people don’t realise was directed by Kubrick; some of those who do know it’s his don’t think it bears his authorial stamp. How free a hand he was given by Universal and the film’s star Kirk Douglas remains a matter of debate; it goes almost without saying that the notoriously controlling Kubrick didn’t feel in charge as much as he wanted to be[1]. But let’s assume, to keep things simple, that he held the reins in most important respects. On that basis, Spartacus is a fine example of what an exceptionally gifted director – with various help – can make of essentially generic material. The genre in question is epic historical drama – to be more precise and disparaging, the Hollywood ‘toga movie’. The various help includes a strong cast, an excellent screenplay and impressive cinematography.
The source material of this biography of Spartacus, the leader of a slave rebellion against the Roman Republic in around 71 BCE, is a novel by Howard Fast, published in 1951. Fast was originally commissioned to write the screenplay; when that didn’t work out, the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo took over. (How he eventually got the screenplay credit sans pseudonym is dramatised in Jay Roach’s 2015 film Trumbo.) Kubrick’s admirably clear storytelling was surely aided by Trumbo’s well-structured script, which includes a lot of dialogue that’s remarkable for its taut wit. The writing of the political manoeuvring in the Roman Senate, which shows the sometimes mixed motives that propel key events, is particularly convincing. Whether showing the rebels encamped or on the move or in battle, the cinematographer Russell Metty achieves a depth of visual field that gives a sense of huge physical scale. After the massacre of the slave army, the line of corpses that stretches on and on is an appallingly powerful image.
Kubrick gets especially good work from the British members of his large cast. (Watching Spartacus makes the ponderous satirical caricatures of A Clockwork Orange and, to a lesser extent, Barry Lyndon all the harder to understand.) As the patrician senator and would-be dictator Crassus, Laurence Olivier is often marvellous, especially in the altogether outstanding episode of Crassus’s visit – with his wife Helena (Nina Foch), her ambitious brother Glabrus (John Dall) and the latter’s wife Claudia (Joanna Barnes) – to the gladiator training centre in Capua run by the businessmen Lentulus Batiatus (Peter Ustinov). When the wives demand fights-to-the-death, Batiatus, though reluctant not to disappoint his guests, explains that’s not how things are done at the camp. ‘Today is an exception,’ says Olivier’s Crassus, concluding the discussion with calm and total authority.
Two contests follow, the first involving Spartacus’s friend Crixus (John Ireland). Kubrick shoots this imaginatively, from the point of view of the anxious Spartacus, inside a slatted wooden cage, where he and his own opponent are held until it’s their turn to fight. Spartacus takes on the African slave Draba (Woody Strode), who disarms the hero and has him at his mercy. As Draba pauses, Helena’s callous-verging-on-bored impatience (‘What’s the matter now? Kill him, you imbecile!’) gives the proceedings a terrible realness and makes all the more startling Draba’s subsequent act of defiance, when he thrusts his weapon, a trident, at his demanding spectators, before being killed by an arena guard and Crassus. The latter, until then, has watched the combat as if with his thoughts partly elsewhere, suggested by Olivier in an ingenious bit of business: he repeatedly fiddles with the torque Crassus wears round his neck.
His handling of the lines in the well-known ‘oysters and snails’ dialogue with Antoninus (Tony Curtis), the new slave to whom Crassus has taken a fancy, is richly entertaining. Later on in the film, though, when he raises his voice repeatedly, Olivier is more bombastic and less compelling. His exchanges with Gracchus (Charles Laughton), Crassus’s populist nemesis, leave you in little doubt who was the greater screen actor. It’s not only Laughton’s bulk but also the way he inhabits a role that makes him so imposing a presence. His readings, no less rhythmical than Olivier’s, are always strongly felt and anchored in character. As Batiatus, Peter Ustinov gives a brilliant portrait of uneasy venality. Ustinov illustrates the challenge, for a professional sycophant who’s also an independent intelligence, of keeping up the ingratiation non-stop. Batiatus’s quick mind and tongue are repeatedly in competition.
Among the few women in evidence, the main one is the slave Varinia (Jean Simmons), whom Spartacus loves and Crassus, though he buys her, unsuccessfully covets: her heart belongs to Spartacus, whose child she bears. Varinia’s virtuous pulchritude gives her character a more generic feel than most of the main men in the story (and Crassus’s rediscovery of her in the aftermath of the massacre of slaves is one of its more corny moments) but, if you’re looking for peerless beauty, you can’t do much better than to cast Jean Simmons and she brings authentic feeling to the role. When Crassus tells his henchmen that their military campaign ‘is not alone to kill Spartacus – it is to kill the legend of Spartacus’, we know the campaign will fail in its larger purpose. The individual Spartacus does die, though, by crucifixion. Jean Simmons ensures that this is a true personal tragedy.
In the title role, Kirk Douglas gives one of his finest performances – impressively athletic and, in the use of his face, emotionally eloquent. His abiding tendency to force feeling comes through occasionally when Spartacus makes speeches but you believe in this man as a popular leader. Douglas is credible and nuanced in his scenes with Jean Simmons: the intimacy between them is unusual in an epic romance. Otherwise, the Americans in the cast don’t fare as well as the British. In some cases (John Dall, for example), they’re overly conscious of the relatively high quality dialogue entrusted to them. They deliver it as if the sole objective is to confirm that – in arch tones, without getting inside the lines. With relatively little to say, Tony Curtis partners Olivier effectively in the bathing scene but his Bronx accent more often sounds ill at ease. As the young Julius Caesar, John Gavin is exceedingly handsome but, even allowing that his character is influenced by elder statesmen, excessively unassuming.
The battle scenes were shot on a plain outside Madrid with Spanish extras playing the opposing armies (including trained Spanish infantry soldiers as members of the Roman force). The extras playing the slaves – men, women and children of various ethnicity – are such consistently interesting camera subjects that it’s hard to believe they weren’t carefully selected for the job. There are times when Kubrick uses these faces and groupings of the slaves to almost documentary effect. Alex North’s abundant music consistently supports the narrative: though it often suggests a conventional historical epic, the score is occasionally sensitive as well as rousing. It also includes overture and intermission music. Spartacus runs a few minutes over three hours but this first-rate film never feels too long.
4 May 2019
[1] ‘If I ever needed any convincing of the limits of persuasion a director can have on a film where someone else is the producer and [the director] is merely the highest-paid member of the crew, Spartacus provided proof to last a lifetime’ (quoted in James Naremore’s On Kubrick (BFI, 2007)).