SPARTACUS
With Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, John Gavin, and John Ireland.
It’s true, however, that the baby is illegitimate, and that the script was written by a former communist, Dalton Trumbo, adapting a best-selling novel by another former communist, Howard Fast. The fact that Trumbo scripted Spartacus was unexceptional; under assumed names, he had scripted a good many movies for reduced fees during the Hollywood blacklist–unlike most of his fellow victims, whose careers went by the wayside–and four years earlier he’d even written a script (for The Brave One) that won an Oscar no one could collect. What was exceptional–and infuriating to Hopper, the American Legion, and others–was that Spartacus gave him screen credit.
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A movie without a single auteur–perhaps to the same degree as more certifiable favorites like Casablanca and Gilda–Spartacus is the result of many conflicting egos and forces, with Universal Pictures, Trumbo, Fast, director Stanley Kubrick, and executive producer and star Kirk Douglas among the main players. The lengthiest account of its making that I’ve read can be found in The Ragman’s Son, Douglas’s 1988 autobiography, which reveals a tissue of paradoxes that seems almost paradigmatic of Hollywood. It confirms Kubrick’s earlier contention that “mine was only one of many voices to which Kirk listened,” but it also reveals that Kirk Douglas’s voice was only one of many voices to which Universal listened.
One of the many paradoxes of this film about freedom–very loosely based on an actual slave revolt in 73 BC–is that it’s the only film Stanley Kubrick directed on which he considered himself enslaved. It seems he got on Douglas’s wrong side by asking to take full credit for Trumbo’s screenplay, a screenplay he later expressed much public disdain for. According to Douglas, it was his own anger and disgust at Kubrick’s suggestion that persuaded him to break the blacklist, rather than any independent desire to set a precedent. Later on, Trumbo submitted a critique more than 80 pages long of Kubrick’s first rough assembly of the film–Douglas calls it “the most brilliant analysis of movie-making that I have ever read”–and Kubrick was evidently required to restructure and reshoot the film on the basis of it. In the process, he won the opportunity to shoot large-scale battle scenes in Spain, which are among the most spectacular ever filmed. Like the training and revolt of the gladiators in the first part of the film, these are scenes with minimal dialogue, and probably because of this they show Kubrick’s masterful hand much more clearly and unequivocally than the other sections.
But let’s not forget that Spartacus is a Hollywood movie; there’s a lot more than Marxism that confuses the relative purity of this model. Spartacus may be a charismatic proletarian hero, but he’s also a teacher and father figure who makes all the basic decisions–moral as well as practical–for the slave rebellion as a whole, so he clearly doesn’t qualify as a cell member. Before the revolt, Spartacus’s opponent in the gladiatorial arena is a noble black, played by Woody Strode, who defeats him. When, instead of killing Spartacus, he throws his triton in the general direction of the Roman spectators who are calling for a kill–and is violently killed by Crassus for this gesture–the reference to the nonviolence and humanism of the civil rights movement is unmistakable.
At the other end of the scale, Tony Curtis and John Ireland as slaves and John Dall and Nina Foch as Romans are pretty awful, and the banal movie-star gloss of their performances periodically undermines some of the film’s best claims to be taken seriously. The film’s nadir is a scene in which Curtis recites a poetic “song” to a group around a campfire and which becomes the occasion for a montage devoted to the beauties of a kitschy soundstage version of “nature,” followed by glimpses of other salt-of-the-earth slaves at rest who register like warmed-over Depression archetypes.
