Film Review
A titanic struggle of wills, in which one unbending individualist takes
on the might of a formidable opponent in the name of freedom and fails,
and where insuperable egos vie for supremacy amid an environment of
mistrust, intolerance and thwarted ambitions. This
résumé might equally well describe the troubled
production history of this film as the story it tells.
Spartacus is an odd digression in
the filmmaking career of Stanley Kubrick, the only film he did not
himself initiate and the only one that resembles a conventional
Hollywood film. Kubrick, a consummate auteur, found the
experience of working on this film so restricting that afterwards he
vowed never again to put himself in the Hollywood straitjacket; for the
remainder of his career, he would stay where he belonged, squarely in
the driving seat.
Spartacus may have been
loathed and disowned by Kubrick, it may lack his trademark cynicism and
wild artistic indulgences, but it is far from being a dismal
failure. In fact it stands as one of the better examples of the
sword and sandals epics - intelligently scripted (by a blacklisted
Dalton Trumbo), well paced, and enlivened by some of the juiciest
performances you can expect to find in a film of this kind. The
film garnered four Oscars: Peter Ustinov was the recipient of the
award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (the only occasion an Oscar
would go to an actor in a Kubrick film); it also won awards for Best
Art Direction, Cinematography and Costume Design for a colour feature.
Kirk Douglas not only took the lead role in
Spartacus (playing to his strengths
as the butch hero of few words and an unassailable moral integrity) but
was the film's executive producer, himself making a sizeable
contribution to its colossal 12 million dollar budget. The
story goes that Douglas was so upset when William Wyler cast Charlton
Heston instead of him for the lead in
Ben-Hur
that he committed himself to making an even bigger historical
epic. David Lean was Douglas's first choice to direct the film,
but when Lean turned him down he hired Anthony Mann, a seasoned
director with some notable screen credits under his belt.
It soon became apparent that Mann's vision of the film failed to match
up to that of his paymaster and at the end of the first week of
shooting Douglas dismissed him. Mann was quickly replaced by
Stanley Kubrick, an up-and-coming young filmmaker who had recently
directed Douglas in
Paths of Glory (1957).
Right from the word go, Kubrick found himself in conflict with his
producer and technicians. He had great reservations over the
screenplay but failed to persuade Douglas to commission a complete
rewrite. He then sacked his cinematographer Russell Metty and
added set lighting and camera direction to his other responsibilities
(Metty was still credited and would, ironically, receive the Oscar for
Best Cinematography). Kubrick's obsessive need to assume complete
artistic control of the project would create ructions that made
Spartacus a fraught and unhappy
production for virtually everyone involved. The battles we seen
on the screen are nothing compared with the battles that went on off
screen, if the first hand accounts are to be believed. In
addition to the daily wrangles between Kubrick and Douglas and his
technicians, there was also a fair amount of conflict in the acting
ranks. The mutual loathing that Laurence Olivier and Charles
Laughton convey in their scenes together isn't simulated; they
genuinely did hate working together and would never have agreed to
appear in the film if Douglas had not employed a little subterfuge in
casting them.
In the light of these backstage skirmishes, it is perhaps something of
a miracle that
Spartacus
stands up as well as it does. The film may fall somewhat short of
the all-round excellence of
Ben-Hur
but its visual impact is almost as great, and it is hard not to be
moved by its powerful depiction of one man's crusade against
tyranny. The only significant flaw is that Douglas's love scenes
with Jean Simmons fail to ring true. Kubrick felt that some of
these scenes were too sentimental and so had the dialogue removed;
unfortunately, he merely rendered them even more toe-curlingly
mawkish. In addition, the battle sequences are less impressive
than they deserve to be, their impact undermined by the cumbersome
Technirama equipment, which placed severe restrictions on the degree of
camera movement. Although the action scenes are well
choreographed, they are painfully static.
Spartacus was a huge
commercial success on its first release, yet when it was re-released in
1967 it was cut by 23 minutes. In 1991, the film was restored,
with some additional scenes that had been removed prior to its first
release. The best known of these resurrected sequences is the
famous oyster-eating scene in which Crassus makes overt sexual advances
to his slave Antoninus. The sound track having been lost, the
dialogue had to be re-dubbed by Tony Curtis and Anthony Hopkins, the
latter giving a faultless imitation of Laurence Olivier (who died a few
years before). In its newly restored format,
Spartacus is a sumptuous epic that
effectively marries the genius of Kubrick with the unbridled resources
of Hollywood, a lavish production that resounds with humanity and
cinematic bravado.
© James Travers 2010
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Next Stanley Kubrick film:
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
Film Synopsis
In 73 BC, Spartacus is an anonymous slave worker, toiling in the mines
of Libya, when he is bought by Lentulus Batiatus, a man who trains and
sells gladiators for profit. The rugged Thracian shows
great promise and is shipped to Capua, where he is subjected to the
brutal regime of Batiatus's training camp. A wealthy patrician,
Marcus Licinius Crassus, coerces Batiatus into arranging a private
gladiatorial contest for him at the camp. After two of the
gladiators are killed in this contest, Spartacus goads the others into
rising up and taking control of Capua. When news of this revolt
reaches Rome, Crassus and his political rival, senator Sempronius
Gracchus, each acts to turn the situation to his own advantage.
Crassus sees this as an opportunity to fulfil his political ambitions
and become an all-powerful dictator, but Gracchus is determined to
thwart him. Meanwhile, word of Spartacus's success has spread
widely, encouraging many thousands of slaves to join him. With
Spartacus's army growing stronger by the day, Crassus conceives a plan
to defeat him, a plan that cannot fail...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.