367. Spartacus (1960)

Directed By Stanley Kubrick (and a little bit by Anthony Mann)

Synopsis

Spartacus is a slave trained as a gladiator, gets other slaves to get uppity in some kind of commie red revolt. It all goes to shit.

Review

This is probably the last of the truly great classical sword and sandal epics. They would be resurrected later by stuff like Gladiator but this is the last great one. And to my opinion it is definitely the best of them all.

The heavy handed religious rhetoric so present in Ben-Hur or Ten Commandments is really absent here, replaced by much smarter and therefore more effective symbolism. It isn't pure coincidence that Spartacus dies on the cross, he brings a message of hope through armed revolution, he is a true hero of the people.

If the American right had any interpretative power they'd be up in arms due to the messianic parallelisms made with an essentially good but violent man, which made me cry with his death on the cross... something no film on Christ ever did. A moving, deep and beautiful film. The best classical epic, but so close to not being one, with short battle scenes, focus on character's emotions, that it really signals the death of the whole genre for a time to come. Oh and Peter Ustinov is amazing throughout.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film was re-released in 1967 (in a version 23 minutes shorter than the original release), and again in 1991 with the same 23 minutes restored by Robert A. Harris, plus an additional 14 minutes that had been cut from the film before its original release. This addition includes several violent battle sequences as well as a bath scene in which the Roman patrician and general Crassus (Olivier) attempts to seduce his slave Antoninus (Curtis) using the analogy of "eating oysters" and "eating snails" to express his opinion that sexual preference is a matter of taste rather than morality.

I'm Spartacus: