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"The new order of affairs" dictates the formal structure, the great slave revolt as fodder in political machinations. Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) "under whip and chain and sun," out of the mines and into the gladiatorial school. Full Metal Jacket is visible in the training sequences, refuting Stanley Kubrick's professed disinterest in the project—the human torso is painted different colors for kill and cripple zones. The smile of the Ethiopian opponent (Woody Strode) illuminates the waiting tank outside the arena, a vertical crane shot gives the length of his corpse hung in the fighters' quarters. (The cruelties are interspersed with the sly comedy of Peter Ustinov's unctuous impresario, vainly trying to steer a pair of "over-painted nymphs" away from his finest merchandise.) The uprising moves toward the ocean, against it the forces of Crassus (Laurence Olivier), who knows a path toward dictatorship when he sees one. "One of the disadvantages of being a Patrician is that occasionally you are obliged to act like one." A mordant obsessive at the helm of a superproduction, thus an epic about futility. (Dalton Trumbo's screenplay has points of contact with Preminger's Exodus, where his concepts of nobility are also cooled by a pragmatic camera eye.) "The might, the majesty, the terror of Rome" in transition from Republic to Empire, the geometric legions that pulverize the utopian masses. Perverse subversion amid bronzed sweep, Crassus and Spartacus as Janus doppelgängers, one can't fully triumph until he possesses the other's beloved (Jean Simmons). Charles Laughton in his toga invokes Sternberg's I, Claudius, the battle is a memory of Griffith's Intolerance. The body and the legend, from the cross contemplating the infant that is his reincarnation, cf. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cinematography by Russell Metty. With Tony Curtis, John Gavin, Herbert Lom, John Ireland, John Dall, Nina Foch, Joanna Barnes, and Charles McGraw.
--- Fernando F. Croce |