Spartacus Review

Kirk Douglas fired Anthony Mann a week in, brought in the twenty one year old who had just directed him in Paths of Glory, and then kept authority over the script for himself. Kubrick delivered on a scale nobody expected and afterwards refused to count it among his films, and both positions are defensible. The pleasures are enormous. Peter Ustinov won an Oscar as a slave dealer with the survival instincts of a rat, Charles Laughton and Laurence Olivier circle each other in the Senate with a relish that makes the politics genuinely gripping, and the gladiator school under Ustinov is the most interesting hour.

Dalton Trumbo's screen credit, taken under his own name for the first time since the blacklist, is a piece of history the film carries. The weaknesses are the ones Kubrick could not fix. The romance between Douglas and Jean Simmons is inert, the hero is written as a symbol without an interior, and at one hundred and ninety seven minutes the final third repeats itself.