Spartacus (1960)
It took twelve million dollars and two years of intensive
planning to complete this epic costume drama starring Kirk
Douglas.
The end results justified the enormous expense, and the movie
was widely praised for its ambitious battle sequences - although
if you look closely you can see Roman soldiers wearing
wristwatches and tennis shoes.
Directing a cast of heavyweight names such as Laurence Olivier
(as the sadistic patrician general Crassus), Jean Simmons (as
slave girl Varinia), Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov and Tony
Curtis, Stanley Kubrick (then aged only 31) brought as much visual
sweep and dramatic emphasis to his epic subject as the Technorama
70 screen could comfortably contain, as well as some excessively
violent scenes which it could not - such as Crassus' callous
puncturing of a gladiator's neck and the severing of a warrior's
arm in a battle between Roman legions and slaves.
For most of its fairly extensive running time, however, Kubrick
wisely concentrated on the development of the personal
relationships described in both the novel and in Dalton Trumbo's
literate screenplay.
Spartacus tells the (embellished) real-life story of a
slave from Thrace (a vast tribal region comprising parts of
modern-day Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey) who, in the first century
BC led a motley army of rebels - mostly escaped slaves - against
the mighty Roman Republic.
While the revolt failed, Spartacus entered legend as the
unlikeliest of heroes: a man who rose from bondage to battle
tyranny, and failed - but ignited a dream of liberty in his
followers' hearts.
"Are you afraid to die?" slave Antoninus (Curtis)
asks Spartacus at one stage in the film. "No more than I was
to be born", replies the slave leader. Hopefully this made
his subsequent crucifixion easier to bear!
Spartacus was filmed partially on location outside Madrid
(where 8,000 Spanish soldiers doubled as Roman legionnaires) and
in Hollywood.
The film netted a massive $14,600,000 and has been
exalted, imitated, honoured, derided, dissected and parodied - but
after all these years it still achieves what three-hour-long big
budget movies rarely get right. It's entertaining as all hell!
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