Dalton Trumbo vs. Stanley Kubrick: Their Debate Over The Political
Meaning of Spartacus
by Duncan L. Cooper
In his "Report on Spartacus", Trumbo complained bitterly about the
rewriting of many of his slave story scenes by persons unknown without his
knowledge or consent. He felt these rewrites were responsible for the
slow turn in the script from his concept of the Large Spartacus to the
opposing concept of the Small Spartacus. Still blacklisted and working on
the film in secret, he was unable to be present on the set or on location
during the shooting of his scenes. Trumbo speculated that most of these
rewrites had been done on the set at the last minute as part of a covert
campaign by Stanley Kubrick to radically alter the nature of the script.
Actually, it appears that most of these rewrites were done by Howard
Fast, in collaboration with Kubrick, at Kirk Douglas's request. But
whatever their differences with Trumbo over the development of the slave
story, it is difficult to believe that Fast or Kubrick could have been
willing participants in the gross distortion of history which Spartacus
became. The hallmark of Kubrick's conception of the film was fidelity to
a bitter realism which spared the illusions of neither the left nor the
right. In response to Michel Ciment's question as to whether there was
any relationship between his interpretation of antiquity in Spartacus and
his brief parody of the inauthentic Hollywood sword and scandal epics of
the 1950's in A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick replied:
Trumbo, for his part, fought stubbornly for his conception of the Large
Spartacus, which he believed was an accurate reflection of history.
Nevertheless, his passionate, eloquent arguments were undermined by his
own insistence on the inevitability of Spartacus's defeat once the chance
of escape from Italy was blocked. Paradoxically, this insistence derived
from Trumbo's own reluctance to confront another reality: the fact that
the failure of revolutions often derives as much from the weaknesses and
mistakes of the revolutionaries as it does from the supposedly
overwhelming strength of their opponents.
It thus appears that the main issue dividing Trumbo from Kubrick was
not the question of whether or not to downplay Spartacus's military
victories, but rather whether or not to identify the slaves' own
incapacity to cope with their newly won freedom as the ultimate cause of
their defeat. This question of the 'relative immaturity' of the masses as
they jump from one era of history into the next during a revolution is the
theme of Arthur Koestler's novel about Spartacus entitled The Gladiators.
At the same time that Kirk Douglas's company. Bryna Productions, was
beginning work on Spartacus, another film company was preparing their own
film about Spartacus based on the Koestler novel. That film, to be
directed by Martin Ritt and starring Yul Brynner as Spartacus and Anthony
Quinn as Crassus, was also being scripted by a blacklisted screenwriter,
Abraham Polonsky. In fact, Polonsky's script was sent to the same
distinguished British actors Olivier, Laughton, and Ustinov at the same
time as Trumbo's. Fortunately for Douglas, the British actors chose the
Trumbo script based on the Howard Fast novel, Nevertheless, Ritt and
Brynner forged ahead with their plans and Douglas was able to quash their
project only by getting into production first with an unfinished script in
which the slave story and the main character were still only roughly
drawn. Later, as that story was being reworked and rewritten, Kubrick
wanted to introduce some provocative ideas from the Koestler novel into
their Fast-based script.
Unfortunately for Kubrick, Trumbo was unalterably opposed to these
changes. In his memo, "The Sequence on Vesuvius: Notes," he made the
point of distinguishing the first longstanding campaign by the film's
executive committee to diminish the military stature of Spartacus from a
subsequent campaign orchestrated by Kubrick personally to diminish the
moral stature of the revolt as a whole:
Kubrick, following Koestler's novel, The Gladiators, wanted Crixus's
rebellion to be motivated by a desire to remain in Italy in order to
pillage and loot its cities. Trumbo, following Fast, wanted to ascribe to
Crixus the noble but suicidal goal of marching directly on Rome in order
to overthrow the entire slave system. Neither Kubrick nor Trumbo seems to
have disagreed with the fundamental premise here: that Spartacus resorts
to the execution of Crixus in order to abort his rebellion and maintain
unity. Neither of them seems to have been bothered by the fact that, in
both novels, Spartacus refuses to take such repressive measures and Crixus
does lead a successful but ultimately abortive breakaway movement.
Trumbo argued for the greater drama inherent in his version of this
script change, referring to the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky:
"The way I have written the part is this: Spartacus and Crixus share
the same goal (freedom). They differ as to how they may reach their goal
(escape via Brundisium versus the capture of Rome). Their conflict is of
the highest moral order, it is a classic tragedy. Spartacus [ultimately]
is compelled to execute Crixus for the good of the whole."[2]
Trumbo goes on in his Notes to make an eloquent but unconvincing plea
to eliminate the use of any of Koestler's ideas in the film. His summary
of Koestler's position in The Gladiators is fair, but his attempt to
explain that position by using a personal attack on Koestler's supposedly
frustrated elitism, is not. In fact, as Koestler wrote in Part Two of his
autobiography, The Invisible Writing, it is the slave army, "the
amorphous, inarticulate, semi-barbarian horde which is the real hero of
the book, milling down the highways of Italy, sacking its cities,
defeating the disciplined legions of Rome."[3] Like Fast, Koestler pays
tribute to the slaves by asserting "the fact that the Slave Army came
within an ace of conquering Rome and thus altering the whole course of
subsequent history".[4]
Then why did the Revolution go down to defeat? For Koestler, Spartacus
is a victim of the 'law of detours,' which compels the leader on the road
to Utopia to be 'ruthless for the sake of pity.' He is 'doomed always to
do what is most repugnant to him, to strip himself of every scruple in
the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of
mankind because of his love for it, an abstract and geometrical love. But
Spartacus shrinks from taking the last step - the purge by crucifixion of
the dissident Celts and the establishment of a ruth-less tyranny - and
through this refusal he dooms his revolution to defeat. In Darkness at
Noon the Bolshevik Commissar Rubashov follows the 'law of detours' to the
end only to discover that "reason alone was a defective compass which led
one such a winding twisted course that the goal finally disappeared in the
mist."[5]
In rejecting Koestler, Trumbo ignored the fact that Howard Fast also
attributed Spartacus's defeat to the moral weakness of the slave class as
a whole, caused by a lifetime of ruthless repression. In a heartrending
scene late in the novel, an old slave woman tells Crassus. "Spartacus
said to us: Rise up and be free! But we were afraid. We are so strong and
yet we cower and whimper and run away." Thus, as Fast wrote, " The masses
of slaves who peopled the Roman world, would not or could not rise up and
join (Spartacus)," thereby dooming his revolution to defeat.
For Trumbo, on the other hand, it was the strength of Rome rather than
the weakness of the slaves which made Spartacus's revolution impossible.
He wrote:
Blaming the failures of modern revolutions on the power of hostile
capitalist powers has become a standard practice for left wing apologists
who refuse to criticize or even acknowledge the shortcomings or crimes of
the regimes they defend, and Trumbo is here falling into that same trap in
his analysts of the failure of a revolution from 2,000 years ago. His
insistence that Spartacus be described as the sole, absolute leader of the
revolt, rather than the spiritual and intellectual soul of a collective
leadership: his anxiety to avoid at all cost the question of the
corruption and degeneration of the leaders of revolutions; and his
inadvertent justification of Stalin's purge of the Old Bolsheviks in order
to preserve unity by referring to the assassination of Trotsky as the
dramatic result of a conflict between two brothers who basically shared
the same goals (!) but espoused conflicting strategies to reach them, all
point to Trumbo's own elitist, authoritarian leanings and indicate that
his analysis has more in common with Koestler's than he would like to
admit. Where Trumbo and Koestler really differ here is on the moral
question of whether and to what extent the end justifies the means.
Similarly, Fast and Koestler share the same basic analysis of Spartacus's
defeat; but for Fast the glass of human liberation was half full while for
Koestler it was, and would always remain, half empty.
Far from espousing an elitist position, Koestler's main thesis in
Darkness at Noon, the novel he wrote immediately after The Gladiators, was
the rejection of self-appointed revolutionary vanguards for whom the end
justifies the means. In The Gladiators, Koestler was merely trying to use
the utopian community founded by Spartacus as a laboratory model for an
isolated socialist revolution in a backward, underdeveloped country like
Russia. His slave heroes cannot be expected to understand the sacrifices
which Spartacus demands of them any more than the Russian peasants could
understand the collectivization of agriculture or forced march
industrialization. But Spartacus has too much compassion for his
followers to choose Stalin's course, to use brutal repression to force
upon them the measures which he knows can alone avert disaster, and he
thereby dooms his revolution to certain defeat.
The point of this story is, or should be, that despite the tremendous
power of Rome, Spartacus nearly did manage to destroy it. That he should
have failed is hardly surprising; the fact that he came as close as he did
is what is so miraculous. In contrast to Koestler's (and Kubrick's)
pessimism, Spartacus's revolt signifies that no pyramidal structure of
oppressive power can remain standing for long, once a sufficient number of
people are determined that it should fall. Spartacus's defeat may have
helped to temporarily turn the Roman slaves' aspirations in the
otherworldly direction of Christianity, but, in the end, it was the
constant resistance of runaway slaves, rebellious peasants, and native
peoples which finally bankrupted and then destroyed the Roman Empire.
Their rough-hewn determination to win freedom remains as alive today as
when Spartacus's revolt began 2,000 years ago.
Koestler's views may well have been too extreme to fit into a film of
this sort, but Kubrick's desire to confront the real moral and political
dilemmas inherent in any violent social change, to recognize the
temptations to personal aggrandizement that inevitably attend the rise to
power of a new, previously downtrodden class, to depict the real political
conflicts within the slave camp paralleling those on the Roman side-in a
word, to inject some political realism into the film could have made
Spartacus a much more deeply probing political work rather than the
vaguely leftist fairy tale most of it became.
[1] Dalton Trumbo, "The Sequence on Vesuvius: Notes," pp. 2-3;
[2] Trumbo, op. cit. pg. 5;
[3] Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing, pg. 326;
[4] Koestler, op. cit.. pg. 322;
[5] Ibid.. pg. 327;
[6] Trumbo, op. cit. pp. 4, 6;
[7] Howard Fast, Spartacus. pp. 168-69 &192-93.
"None at all. In Spartacus I tried with only limited success to make the
film as [historically] real as possible but I was up against a pretty dumb
script which was rarely faithful to what is known about Spartacus. History
tells us that he twice led his victorious slave army to the northern
borders of Italy, and could quite easily have gotten out of the country.
But he didn't, and instead he led his army back to pillage Roman cities.
What the reasons were for this might have been the most interesting
question the film might have pondered. Did the intentions of the rebellion
change? Did Spartacus lose control of his leaders who by now may have
been more interested in the spoils of war than in freedom? In the film,
Spartacus was prevented from escape by the silly contrivance of a pirate
leader who reneged on a deal to take the slave army away in his ships. If
I ever needed any convincing of the limits of persuasion a director can
have on a film where someone else is the producer and he is merely the
highest-paid member of the crew, then Spartacus provided proof to last a
lifetime."
In Spartacus, Kubrick wanted to graphically illustrate the violence,
brutality and corruption of both the masters and the slaves, thus forcing
the audience to choose between them. During the course of shooting he
submitted a list of some seventeen "gory shots" to be included in the
film's battle scenes. Only a handful were approved by Kirk Douglas and
actually shot, and even those were censored later. By revealing the
terrible sacrifices which any war imposes on the combatants, Kubrick hoped
to raise the question of whether even a noble goal like freedom can
justify the human cost. His intent may have been to counteract Trumbo's
glorification of the slaves' rebellion, but he could not effectively do so
without recounting the fundamental truth about the events of the Servile
War, a truth which other members of the film's executive committee seemed
quite willing to set aside.
"Thus was the first campaign against the stature of Spartacus defeated.
Then I began to see a second campaign to diminish the character get under
way, directed, my dear Stanley Kubrick, by you. Stanley read Koestler.
Koestler is a man who was for years bewitched by the idea that he was
going to make a revolution, that he was going to lead the dear people in a
vast freedom movement. But the revolution didn't come off because the
people, in their immense stupidity, didn't see fit to follow Mr.
Koestler. Koestler has spent all the years of his life since that fatal
moment of rejection by the people in denouncing the common herd which had
so little comprehension of his excellence as a leader. His thesis is
simple: the people are stupid, corrupt and altogether responsible for
their own miseries. Leaders, on the other hand, are the elite of mankind.
tragically frustrated, tragically pulled down and destroyed by the
decadence and vulgarity of the very rabble they sought to lead to
freedom. Thus Koestler has rationalized the stupidities of his own youth
by placing them on the backs of the gross mob which refused to recognize
his virtues.... The point is not whether the Koestler theory is
philosophically or historically right or wrong: it is rather that all
theories are debatable, and that the Koestler theory is directly
antipathetical to the theory of the script of Spartacus ... I think it is
dead wrong to transmit any part of Koestler into Spartacus. Nevertheless,
the Koestler theory still pops up, not as a "conspiracy" but as a
conviction on Stanley's part, and I think we must accept it, or reject
it, since it is impossible to compromise with it."[1]
Specifically, Trumbo was attacking Kubrick's proposed version of a plot
enhancement to the film which may be described as "The Rebellion of
Crixus" leading up to "The Hanging of Crixus." History attests that Crixus
was one of the other leaders of the slave rebellion. He appears to have
led a group of 20,000 to 30,000 slaves in a breakaway movement from the
slave army. He and his men were quickly annihilated by the Romans,
placing Spartacus and the remaining slaves in an almost fatally weakened
position. In the proposed script change, Spartacus learns of the plot to
split the slave army and, despite some personal misgivings, hangs Crixus
as a traitor.
"Let us remember that the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky was more
dramatic than the conflict between, let us say, Lenin and the Tsar. Why,
because Stalin and Trotsky had the same objective, while Lenin and the
Tsar had different objectives. Because war between brothers is more
dramatic and more tragic than any other kind.
In arguing for Crixus as a left wing extremist rather than a bandit,
Trumbo is trying to avoid the second big question surrounding the idea of
revolution, a question posed at the time of his writing by the revelations
of Khruschchev's secret speech: Granting for the moment the possibility of
overthrowing the old order, would the new state of affairs be any better?
Isn't there a strong tendency for the leaders of the revolution to simply
supplant the old rulers as a new exploiting class, to appropriate for
themselves the lion's share of the spoils of victory and to establish a
ruthless dictatorship to protect their newly won gains? This issue had
already been raised in the film in the scene in which Spartacus intervenes
to prevent Crixus from fighting two captured Romans to the death as a
gladiatorial pair. The continuation of this conflict between a Crixus,
who wants to use his power for his own self-aggrandizement, and a
Spartacus, who has a vision of a new harmonious way for people to live
together, would have added another, deeper dimension to the otherwise
superficial, starry-eyed portrait of the internal politics of the slave
community which the film provides.
"Koestler was interested in the weaknesses, the vices, the
degeneration and demoralization of the slaves, our interest is in showing
their strength, their increasing morale and unity to the very end, when
the last of them is crucified, Stanley has said that he wants Crixus as a
raider because he wishes to show the demoralization of the slaves. This
would be valid if our story established that the demoralization of the
slaves led to their defeat. But in our version the demoralization of the
slaves could not possibly lead to their defeat because a hundred thousand
of them stood to the death in defense of their freedom and of each other.
The slaves in our story were defeated by Rome, not by their own
weaknesses. Koestler may be right that they were actually defeated by
their own demoralization and inability to cope with freedom, but so he was
right only for Koestler's book. . . the one they couldn't make a movie
of. He is wrong for our book ... the one we are making a movie of ... the
slave demoralization [is] derived from an historical point of view which
is highly dubious, since it discounts altogether the fact that Spartacus
and a hundred thousand men could scarcely be expected to defeat Rome and
the Roman empire and the known world. That was why Spartacus lost ... not
because the slaves are too stupid to be free; and that is what we're
dramatizing in this script. Not the reverse."[6]
In contrast to Trumbo's defeatist attitude, Fast, along with Koestler,
took a more hopeful, positive view of Spartacus's real chances of
winning. In Fast's novel, Crassus confesses to his peers:
"You will hear it said that the Servile War was a small thing. It's
quite natural that such a view should be taken, since it profits Rome
little to tell the world what a job we had with some slaves. But here, on
this pleasant terrace at the home of my dear and good friend Antonius
Caius, with the company we have, we can dispense with legends. No one
ever came as close to destroying Rome as Spartacus did. No ever wounded
her so terribly... If Spartacus ever had under his command anything like
the three hundred thousand men he is supposed to have led, then we would
not be sitting here today on this pleasant morning at the loveliest
country home in Italy. Spartacus would have taken Rome and the world
too. Others may doubt that. But I fought him enough times not to doubt
it. I know. The whole truth is that the mass of the slaves of Italy
never joined Spartacus. Do you think if they were made of such mettle we
would be sitting here like this on a plantation where the slaves outnumber
us a hundred to one? Of course many joined him, but he never led more than
forty-five thousand fighting men, and that was only at the height of his
power. He never had cavalry such as Hannibal did, yet he brought Rome
closer to her knees than Hannibal ever did, a Rome so powerful it could
have crushed Hannibal in a single campaign!"[7]
Trumbo really wants to have it both ways. His reliance on the
overwhelming power of Rome to explain Spartacus's inevitable defeat
contradicts his insistence on emphasizing his protagonist's heroic
military accomplishments. How could Spartacus's revolt have shaken Rome
to its very foundations, as Trumbo maintains, if in fact it was doomed
from the very beginning? If there never was any real chance of winning,
then why bother dwelling on Spartacus's victories as a symbol of hope in
the first place? Isn't the actual message of the film basically true, that
in history 'almost' doesn't count and nice guys finish last?
References:
Copyright ©1996 Duncan L. Cooper All Rights Reserved