Spartacus: swords, sandals and epic spats
Kubrick’s classic was beset with problems from the start, and its release caused outrage. Sixty years on, Alexander Larmer tells the story
‘I’m Spartacus!” “No, I’m Spartacus!” The climax of Stanley Kubrick’s Roman epic, which is now 60 years old, is one of the most iconic, admired and parodied scenes ever filmed. As the defeated slave army, led by Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, face mass execution unless they betray their chief, they pull together as one and stirringly resist the entreaties of Laurence Olivier’s imperialistic senator Crassus.
As a piece of cinema, it is superb, but this was not the only intention that Douglas, who also produced the film, and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo had in mind. Trumbo had been one of the so-called Hollywood Ten, blacklisted and imprisoned for his communist sympathies and refusal to name names before Congress, and his script for Spartacus took the traditional generic tropes of the sword-andsandals epic and gave them fresh and angry life with biting contemporary resonance.
Yet everything about Spartacus is unusual and dynamic. Although it can superficially be compared to such contemporary blockbuster epics as Quo Vadis and Ben-hur, it is an entirely different film, closer to David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia in its thoughtful script, moral ambiguity and (in its restored version) provocative sexual content. It occupies a unique place in Kubrick’s distinguished filmography as being the only work that he did not originate himself, and yet its themes and mise-en-scène remain entirely Kubrickian. It features two distinct styles of performance, contrasting English actors working within a theatrical, Shakespearean tradition, and American film stars entirely aware of the power of the big screen.
“It was a very internal and intimate seed that sprouted into this huge thing,” Peter Ustinov, who won an Oscar for his performance as the wily slave trader Batiatus, would later say of his involvement in the film: “The executives were rather nervous about the whole thing at the beginning, because of the absence of the Christian element which would have been invaluable for the publicity department.”
Usually, the big epics of the time had an explicitly religious focus – Ben-hur even featured Jesus as a character – but the $12 million Spartacus had no such theme. This unorthodox approach, in fact, led directly to the sacking of the original director Anthony Mann a week into shooting, Douglas explaining later that Mann had “seemed scared at the scope of the picture”.
Douglas then hired Kubrick, with whom he had had a good collaboration on 1957’s First World War drama Paths of Glory, and the filming continued. But the then-30year-old director had a baptism of fire in his adjustment to large-scale filmmaking.
The battles off-screen were almost as fierce as those on it, not only between Douglas and Kubrick but between the performers, especially Olivier, Ustinov and the great Shakespearean actor Charles Laughton, who all shamelessly tried to steal every scene they were in.
Abandoned at a garage, Kirk Douglas, covered in grime and dressed in a tattered loincloth, desperately tried to hitch a lift back to the set
Ironically, given that Mann had been fired for being out of his depth, Kubrick seemed overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the project. He responded to this by developing an icily autocratic style that did not allow for disagreement or improvisation, and led to him butting heads with Douglas, who was surprised that his previous collaborator was not docile and amenable: the actor would later describe the director as “a talented sh--”. At one point, Kubrick told the veteran cinematographer Russell Metty, who was complaining about the director’s meticulous and intrusive instructions, “You can do your job by sitting in your chair and shutting up. I’ll be the director of photography.”
As Ustinov later mused: “I don’t know that we ever saw the real Kubrick; he was using this, quite rightly, to hit the big time, and wanted to do films his own way. He lived with the film, but didn’t feel it as profoundly as he later did.”
There were lighter moments, too. Ustinov recounted a memorable story about Douglas having a weekend break in Palm Springs, dressed in his slave costume. At one point, he hopped out of his limousine at a petrol station and the driver, seeing a remaining pile of rags in the back, assumed that Douglas was still in the car and drove off. This then led to the spectacle of one of the most powerful actors of the day, covered in grime and dressed in a tattered loincloth, desperately trying to hitch a lift back to the set.
Spartacus was filmed in both California and Madrid, with the epic battle scenes using 8,000 soldiers from the Spanish infantry, and when completed, Douglas loudly announced his intention of crediting Trumbo as screenwriter, giving the latter his first on-screen credit since 1945’s Our Vines Have Tender Grapes.
The film premiered in 1960 to some controversy, not least protests from the National Legion of Decency, which was offended both by it being written by a communist sympathiser and by its strong violence and sexual content. As a result, a number of battle scenes were deleted, as was a suggestive bathroom scene between Olivier and Tony Curtis’s slave Antoninus, in which Gracchus reveals his bisexuality to the young man by discussing the metaphor of “snails and oysters”.
Nevertheless, the protests and picketing might have proved fatal for the film at the box office, had it not been for Douglas, who used his considerable influence to persuade the newly elected president John F Kennedy to cross a picket line and watch the film. This symbolic action not only silenced the Legion of Decency but also saw the oncepowerful House Committee on Un-american Activities, which had persecuted Trumbo and many others, humiliated.
In the end, the film was an enormous commercial success and won four Oscars. But Spartacus has changed since that initial release and today, thanks to an extensive restoration beginning in 1989, it now features many of the deleted scenes.
Film historian Robert Harris, who worked with Universal to bring the restoration to fruition, recalls a long and involved job, made particularly difficult by the discovery that some of the audio for deleted or lost scenes was missing, most notably the “snails and oysters” scene.
As Harris explains, the team came up with a novel solution.
“As far as tech issues with the looping of dialogue, there really were no problems,” he says.
“We had located the surviving music from the sequence, and the Universal sounds department was able to create the sound effects. Tony Curtis made himself available – and he’d done these things before. He was perfect. [But] since Sir Laurence Olivier had just passed, we felt that before we did anything, we needed a “moral” permission to revoice his work, and reached out via Lawrence of Arabia editor Anne Coates to her friend [and Olivier’s widow] Joan Plowright. Her response was to get Anthony Hopkins, as he used to drive Larry crazy doing a take of his St Crispin’s Day speech at parties. He agreed to help. His lines were directed by Kubrick via fax.”
Belying his reputation for being both aloof and uninterested in his “for hire” film, Kubrick collaborated fully with the restoration, as did Douglas. “Kubrick came on board at the very beginning, along with Douglas,” recalls Harris. “He was extremely helpful with tech problems, as he immediately understood our problems of the day, and how we intended to solve them. We generally spoke once or twice a week, as necessary. Once we finished business, he always wanted to know how the Yankees were doing. Douglas wanted everything back that we could find from the pre-censorship cut, and joined us in going through the vaults in search of elements, of which there were thousands of cans.”
The finished and restored film remains one of the classic epics, a major influence on everything from Gladiator to, of all things, Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
“I love the film,” says Harris, who has also restored the likes of My Fair Lady and Lawrence of Arabia. “Along with William Wyler’s Ben-hur, it is possibly the greatest of the biblical/ Roman era epics. Extraordinary performances – Douglas, Olivier, Curtis, Simmons, Laughton, Ustinov, Foch, Barnes, Strode… peerless. Magnificently photographed by Russell Metty, a great Alex North score, beautifully cut by Robert Lawrence, with more than a bit of help from Saul Bass. Not bad direction, either...”
And I have my own, fond, association with the film’s legacy. I was once having a haircut in a silent men’s barbers in London, and the hairdresser next to me asked his customer what his name was. “I’m Spartacus,” the man replied. Unable to resist, I quickly shouted “No, I’m Spartacus!” Nobody seemed to get the joke, and we all continued in embarrassed silence until our haircuts were finished.