Spartacus (1960)

“The script could have been improved in the course of shooting, but it wasn’t. Kirk [Douglas] was the producer. He and Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter, and Edward Lewis, the executive producer, had everything their way.”
-Stanley Kubrick
Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography

I watched Spartacus for one reason and one reason alone: out of obligation to finish viewing every single one of Stanley Kubrick’s 12 available features (his first, Fear and Desire (1953) has never been released on video). I’m happy to say it was more compelling than I had imagined and despite the worrisome quote above, basically a success, though one that feels a little dated. Kirk Douglas is best in the first Act of the film, when he silently anguishes in a subterranean holding cell for slaves being trained to fight as gladiators for Lentalus Batiatus (the great Peter Ustinov), a man who is less nasty in lording over his doomed than Oliver Reed’s gnarled Proximo in Gladiator, but still cheerfully pitiless. There is a powerful and moving moment when Kirk Douglas’s eponymous hero is beaten in a impromptu gladiatorial battle by Draba (Woody Strode), a tall fearsome black slave.


Draba is given the thumbs down by Senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) and his female companion, but instead of plunging his trident into Spartacus’s throat, Draba hurls it at Crassus and leaps up to the balcony where the royals spectate, only to be incapacitated by a spear, and then brutally slashed by Crassus, sacrificing his life for human decency. It is a devastating moment of noble heroism that is all the more effective for transpiring without bluntly informing us of how noble it was.

Unlike, say, a crucial scene near the end, when the captured Spartacus talks to his loyal soldier and friend, Antoninus (Tony Curtis) outside the gates of Crassus’s fortress.

Antoninus: “Could we have won, Spartacus? Could we ever have won?”

Spartacus: “Just by fighting them, we won something.”

This exchange and the many others where characters talk incessantly, faces shining while violins play, about F-R-E-E-D-O-M is not too far removed from the platitudes of Braveheart, and if the screenplay of the film had been written by Kubrick (he wrote, or co-wrote all of his other films, including Lolita, for which he went uncredited), such clichéd aphorisms would have been excised. As would the mawkish romance between Spartacus and Varinia (Jean Simmons), who frolic in a meadow in one scene while warm gooey music strums insufferably.

Spartacus: I’m free. And what do I know? I don’t even know how to read.

Varinia: You know things that can’t be taught.

Spartacus: I know nothing. Nothing! And I want to know. I want to. I want to know.

Varinia: Know what?

Spartacus: …I want to know all about you. Every line…every curve. I want to know every part of you. Every beat of your heart.

No doubt Stanley Kubrick was in pain when it came time to shoot this scene. I was in pain watching it. Again, Spartacus was the one film on which Kubrick had no involvement in preplanning, notably in crafting the screenplay. That is not to say that Dalton Trumbo’s dialogue is without merit; on the contrary, there is a wealth of it. There is the relief of Charles Laughton’s cynical, decadent old Gracchus, who when informed by Peter Ustinov’s Batiatus that he’s “…found something I never had with all my wealth…dignity,” says, “In Rome, dignity shortens life, even more surely than disease.”

Much credit should go to Saul Bass. Bass is the most famous graphic designer in film history for his revolutionary opening title sequences, often combining animation and live action to create energetic film credits which sucked the viewer into a film in a way that had never been done before. His most famous sequences are the ones in The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. While the one he designed for Spartacus is not one of his most dynamic, his contributions to the film went beyond title design. He scouted locations, worked on set design, and single-handedly blueprinted the battle scenes of the film. “He storyboarded the scene in which the slaves break down the fence of the gladiator school and originated the concept of the slaves’ using the fence as a weapon” (LoBrutto, 171). He also was responsible for thinking up the ingenious concept of the flaming logs that Spartacus’s army roll down the hill at the charging Romans. Spartacus has the look and the impact of many different collaborators’ achievements and failures being stirred together in the same pot, which gives it the ultimate, vaguely dissatisfying feeling of not cohering into one visionary whole.

Spartacus has many of Kubrick’s stylistic touches, but the actual story has zero: no subversive humor, no lack of sentimentality, no wicked perversity. The film does end mostly tragic and carries an inexorable gloom, but it has a generic sort of pessimism, glum, without Kubrick’s impish gallows humor. Another massive deficiency is the lighting and photography – reading about Kubrick on the set of Spartacus, it is clear that he showed a once in a lifetime complacency about the film he was working on. In Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, he writes, “Although Kubrick was under the enormous pressure of an epic production and having to cope with ubiquitous power struggles, his disengagement from a film that wasn’t really his and his inbred sense of dark humor helped move him through the project.” While he was uncompromising about many things, the long takes, calling for scenes to be covered in every possible angle, the shooting ratio (the ratio between the total duration of footage shot for a film and the footage which results from its final cut), he did not show his characteristic attention to the lighting as he had in The Killing and Paths of Glory. This could have been a result of the open hostility from Spartacus director of photography, Russell Metty, who was heard to say, “Let’s get that little Jew-boy from the Bronx off the crane” (LoBrutto, 185). There was much in-fighting between the two on the set, all of which Kubrick endured without raising his voice or becoming angry, another sign of his disengagement from Spartacus. Anyone who has watched Vivian Kubrick’s 35-minute documentary detailing the making of The Shining, has witnessed Stanley Kubrick being disquietingly irascible with Shelley Duvall.

He just didn’t care as much, and it shows. There isn’t a hint of the brilliant Expressionistic lighting of The Killing and Paths of Glory, the very thing that made those films so astonishing. In Spartacus, the photography is adequate, but not particularly interesting to look at: the daylight scenes are too bright and the night scenes are too murky. Indeed, Spartacus has the least impressive cinematography of the 11 Kubrick films I’ve seen. Considered alone, it is a fine handsome epic, but among Kubrick’s oeuvre, it is an unfortunate weak spot.


Grade: B