9 / 10
Official trailer
Spartacus is Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 American historical epic depicting the slave revolt led by Thracian gladiator Spartacus against the Roman Republic in 73-71 BC. The film traces Spartacus from his enslavement and gladiator training at the school of Lentulus Batiatus through his escape, the assembly of an army of escaped slaves and their eventual defeat by Roman general Crassus.
Kirk Douglas plays Spartacus. Laurence Olivier plays Crassus. Charles Laughton plays Senator Sempronius Gracchus. Peter Ustinov plays Batiatus. Jean Simmons plays Varinia. Tony Curtis plays slave Antoninus.
John Gavin plays Julius Caesar. Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay from Howard Fast’s 1951 novel. Bryna Productions produced the film on a budget of approximately 12 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 60 million dollars worldwide. The work won four Academy Awards including Best Supporting Actor for Ustinov.
Spartacus is the Roman epic I’d pick over all the others, because it has a spine the rest of them lack. I get swept up in the size of it, the gladiator school and the armies, and what keeps me there is the anger underneath: a story about people who won’t give up one of their own, made by a writer who’d been punished for refusing to name names.
The film is one of the classic Roman epics and the film that broke the Hollywood blacklist by giving Dalton Trumbo screen credit under his own name. Trumbo had been blacklisted since 1947 for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kirk Douglas, as both star and producer through his Bryna Productions company, insisted that Trumbo receive credit despite studio opposition. President-elect John F. Kennedy publicly crossed picket lines to see it. That signaled the formal end of the blacklist period.
The production scale, the political content and the credit restoration together give Spartacus a weight a pure historical epic wouldn’t carry. It’s ancient Roman drama and a 1960 American political document at the same time, and that double life is why it matters more to me than the bigger, emptier epics of its era.
Breaking the Blacklist
Dalton Trumbo had been blacklisted since 1947 when he was sentenced to prison for refusing to testify about Communist Party membership before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He continued working under pseudonyms throughout the 1950s, winning two Academy Awards under fronts whose actual identities were widely known but officially undisclosed. Kirk Douglas insisted on giving Trumbo screen credit on Spartacus despite studio opposition and despite the personal political risk Douglas faced.
The Spartacus credit restored Trumbo’s career publicly. President-elect Kennedy crossed American Legion picket lines in February 1961 to see the film, a sign that the blacklist had effectively ended. Multiple later Hollywood films began crediting blacklisted writers under their actual names. The political weight Spartacus has beyond its dramatic content depends considerably on its role in this historical moment. The film helped end one of the more shameful periods in twentieth-century American cultural history. The achievement matters independently of the dramatic content of this picture.
I admire Kirk Douglas more for this than for anything he does with a sword. Putting Trumbo’s real name on the screen was a personal risk, and I think the film is better because it came from people willing to take it.
For Writers
Production choices can carry political content beyond what scripts contain. The same logic works in creative work. Who gets credit for what they made affects whose later work becomes possible.
The I Am Spartacus Scene
Late in the film, Roman soldiers offer the captured slaves freedom in exchange for identifying which one is Spartacus.
The escaped slaves rise one by one to declare I’m Spartacus, knowing the declaration commits them to crucifixion. The sequence acquires cultural reference standing through later decades. The scene has been parodied in The Naked Gun (1988), referenced in The Office (2003), and continues to function as shorthand for collective solidarity against authoritarian demands.
The scene works as direct allegorical reference to the blacklist period when actors and writers who refused to name colleagues before HUAC faced career destruction. Trumbo wrote the scene with this allegory in mind. Audiences in 1960 understood the political content. The scene’s continued power over decades illustrates how successful allegorical material can outlast its original political moment while maintaining its core argument. Solidarity against authoritarian demands remains relevant regardless of which authoritarian demand works in any given period.
That scene puts a lump in my throat. I think it works because Kubrick lets it build one man at a time, and by the time they’re all on their feet the allegory doesn’t need explaining.
For Writers
Allegorical scenes can outlast their original political moment when the underlying conflict remains recurrent. The same applies to fiction. Material that addresses a particular moment may still matter beyond it if the moment reflects a recurring structural problem.
Olivier’s Crassus
Laurence Olivier plays Crassus as a Roman aristocrat whose pursuit of Spartacus reflects political ambition instead of ideological commitment.
Crassus opposes the slave revolt because suppressing it’ll gain him political power, not because the revolt represents fundamental threat to Roman society. The performance gives the antagonist political coherence that conventional villains in epic productions typically lack. Olivier plays Crassus as intelligent, controlled, and self-defeating through his obsession with personal supremacy.
The performance also includes the famous oysters-and-snails dialogue with Tony Curtis as the slave Antoninus.
The scene implies sexual interest in male slaves on Crassus’s part. The 1960 Production Code required the scene to be cut from the original theatrical release. The scene was restored in the 1991 restoration after Anthony Hopkins recorded the dialogue replacing Olivier’s then-deceased original recording. Its restoration shows how blacklist-era productions sometimes suffered cuts beyond just political content. Restored versions provide access to material the original release suppressed.
Olivier is the best thing in the film for me, cold and clever and so sure of himself that I enjoy watching his obsession eat at him. I’m glad the oysters-and-snails scene is back, too. It tells me more about Crassus in one short exchange than the rest of the script manages, even if hearing Hopkins stand in for Olivier’s voice is a little strange.
For Writers
Production restrictions affect what work can communicate. The same applies to creative work. What a work couldn’t say in its original conditions matters for an accurate reading of what it attempted.
Craft Note
Stanley Kubrick replaced Anthony Mann as director early in production after Kirk Douglas fired Mann. Kubrick was thirty-one and had directed Paths of Glory (1957) before Spartacus. The director-producer relationship between Kubrick and Douglas was difficult throughout production. Kubrick later disowned Spartacus as not fully his work because he lacked final authority over many decisions. The film succeeds despite this picture conflicts because the assembled talent was considerable enough to deliver strong material even when working under suboptimal collaboration conditions.
Does Spartacus still hold up?
It’s a 9. I rank it among the defining Roman epics, it broke the Hollywood blacklist, and the I’m Spartacus scene deserves every parody it’s inspired. What costs it the last point for me is the length and a love story with Jean Simmons that I find dutiful, and I can feel Kubrick straining against a production he didn’t control. Watch it for Roman spectacle, for American political cinema, or for a film whose making matters as much as what’s on screen.
