Who Killed Spartacus?
How Studio Censorship Nearly Ruined by Duncan L. Cooper
In October 1961 Universal Pictures premiered an historical epic entitled
Spartacus. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Kirk Douglas in the
title role, and based on a novel by Howard Fast, the film purported to
tell the true story of a gladiator 2,000 years ago who led a mighty slave
uprising which almost succeeded in overthrowing the decaying Roman
Republic and its ruthless slave empire.
In many ways the film represented a breakthrough for left wing themes
in Hollywood cinema after a decade of McCarthyite repression, not only
because of its revolutionary political message but also because
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo received official credit for the screenplay
under his own name, thereby effectively breaking the blacklist which had
been in effect in Hollywood throughout the Fifties. Efforts by right wing
columnist Hedda Hopper and the American Legion to promote a boycott of the
film failed when newly elected President John F. Kennedy publicly endorsed
the picture after attending a Washington screening and Spartacus went on
to become an international box office smash, capturing the Golden Globe
Award as the Best Dramatic Film of 1961.
However, as author Howard Fast told The New York Times some years
later, "A number of my books have been made into films, but none of them
have been done complete justice." In the case of Spartacus, despite the
extensive contributions to the film's screenplay made by Fast, for which
he has never received the credit he deserves, an enormous gap exists
between the vision of Spartacus which emerges from his novel and the one
projected by the film. Using the little that is known about Spartacus as a
springboard, Fast molded the gladiator rebel into a truly mythic hero, a
messianic figure engaged in an epic revolutionary struggle to overthrow
the Roman Empire in order to restore a legendary Golden Age of primitive
tribal communism said to have existed in some distant epoch prior to
the advent of human exploitation. For Fast, strict adherence to the known
facts was less important than the timeless moral truth of the legend of
Spartacus which was implicit in them. By contrast, the film, following a
more conservative reading of the extant facts, reduced Fast's gentle,
Christlike character to a brawling animal who slowly develops into a
likeable tough and then gradually into a sensitive human being and
democratic leader. Instead of Fast's visionary who, through the force of
his charismatic personality and military genius, was able to weld an
amorphous mass of "slaves, deserters and riff-raff "into a force which
managed to defeat nine of Rome's best trained armies and nearly toppled
the empire itself, the film presents us with a 'good man,' a capable
leader for whom everything seems to come easy, but whose revolt founders
in an orgy of torture and death almost before it has barely begun. The
escape to freedom of Spartacus's wife and newborn son in the midst of the
ensuing carnage offers the audience but a few scant rays of hope for the
future, especially when one considers that the Roman Empire managed to
hang on for another 500 years.
Because of this gap some admirers of the film believed cuts imposed
by Universal Pictures and the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency had
reduced its image of the legendary giant, Spartacus, down to midgit-sized
proportions. These cuts included some gory shots of arms, legs, and heads
being cut off in battle, a lengthy scene of a man being drowned in a pot
of soup, a shot of blood spurting onto Laurence Olivier's face as he
slashes the neck of the dying Woody Strode, and the subtly bisexual
'Oysters and Snails' seduction scene between Olivier and Tony Curtis. It
was thought that these cuts, totaling about five minutes, might also
include at least one battle scene depicting a significant victory for the
slave army, the lack of which was made more evident by, numerous lines of
dialog throughout the film which referred directly or indirectly to many
such victories, The lines from Spartacus's speech to the assembled slaves
on the beach "We've travelled a long ways together. Fought many battles.
Won great victories" -- and his lines to Varinia -- "But no matter how many
times we beat them, they always seem to have another army to send against
us. And another." -- are but two of the most pointed examples.
Thus when it was announced in September 1990 that Universal Pictures
was going to release a fully restored version of the film with five
minutes of censored footage reinserted, many fans of the film dared to
hope that perhaps now, after thirty years, the authentic, unexpurgated,
legendary Spartacus might finally appear on screen. The statements of the
restoration producers Jim Katz and Robert Harris, in which they touted
their restoration as "a film with "an entirely different tone, ...a
completely different film [from] the version we're used to," further
raised hopeful expectations.
Spartacus already had a lot going for it, including magnificent
performances by Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Oscar-winner Peter
Ustinov, some deeply moving scenes from the pen of Dalton Trumbo,
magnificent camera work by Oscar-winner Russell Metty, brilliant editing
by Oscar nominee Robert Lawrence, a stirring musical score by Oscar
nominee Alex North, and, of course, the masterful direction of Stanley
Kubrick. These elements, combined with Howard Fast's heroic theme of
mankind's age-old quest for freedom, make Spartacus on many levels a
powerful, moving epic whose impact has been multiplied several fold as a
result of the meticulous work by Robert Harris in restoring the film to
its lavish new 70mm format.
Unfortunately, since almost all the outtakes, trims. and censored
scenes from the film were junked by Universal in 1975, there was very
little the film's restorers could do beyond reinserting about five minutes
of lost footage to bring Spartacus back to its 197-minute pre-censorship
version. Thus, in terms of actual content, the restored version is still
basically the same film which audiences saw during its original run in the
early 1960s. A few censored scenes have been restored, notably the
surprisingly innocuous 'Oysters and Snails' seduction scene between
Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis, the two quick shots showing the blood
(and the terror) on Olivier's face as he stabs the mortally wounded Woody
Strode to death, and a longer version of the devastation scene following
the film's final battle. On the other hand, several important scenes
between Senator Gracchus, the fictionalized leader of the Roman plebeians
played by Charles Laughton, and his protege, the young Julius Caesar,
remain missing despite Harris's heroic efforts to find them. These scenes
defined Gracchus's political identity through a sometimes hilarious
depiction of his corrupt relationship to his constituents, the common
citizens of the fourth ward. They also explained the real motivation for
Caesar's crucial defection to Crassus and the patricians late in the film,
namely, Gracchus's own defection to Spartacus.
Even more disappointing, Harris failed to discover any trace of even
one lost battle scene depicting a major slave victory over the Roman
legions. Thus, both the real and the legendary historic stature and
achievements of Spartacus and his movement remain as absent from the
restored version of the film as they were from the original, censored
version. This film provides as much dramatic comprehension of the real
events of Spartacus's rebellion as Mel Brook's "Springtime for Hitler" did
for the Second World War. If there were a Memorial Society for the
Preservation of the Historical Legend Of Spartacus, then its members would
be demanding that Universal Pictures include in all its advertising for
Spartacus a sort of Cinematic Surgeon General's label:"CAUTION: Viewing
This Film May Be Hazardous To Your Full Appreciation of the Myth Arising
Out of the Actual Historical Events."
But if blame must be assigned for this dishonest film, this travesty
of historical truth, then very little of it would fall on the shoulders of
Stanley Kubrick. The then-thirty-one-year-old Kubrick had very little
control over the content of the film, all final decisions being made by
Executive Producer Kirk Douglas, subject of course to the veto of
Universal Studios. It is not surprising that, despite the support and
assistance which he did provide to the restoration, Kubrick has never
retracted his public disavowal of Spartacus. "I am disappointed in the
film," he mused rather wistfully, "it had everything but a good story."
In fact, the evidence indicates that Kubrick himself was only too
willing to portray the violence, corruption and moral degeneration which
inevitably results from a long, drawn out, bitterly contested class war.
He may have hoped to temper screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's adulation of the
working class and enthusiasm for violent revolution with the ironic fact
that revolutions often fail much more because of the moral weaknesses and
corruption of the revolutionaries that as a result of the supposedly
overwelmingly superior strength of their adversaries. Lacking the
authority to make final decisions, Kubrick engaged the other members of
the film's executive committee -- screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, Executive
Producer Kirk Douglas, and Producer Edward Lewis -- in a running, sometimes
acrimonious debate through four versions of the script over what final
form the film should take.
Nor can blame be assigned to Kubrick's predecessor, the studio's
original designee to direct Spartacus, Anthony Mann. Deservedly respected
for his epic westerns and film's noire, Mann supervised, along with
Douglas, the four months of pre-production preparations for the film and
presumably participated in the complete rewrite of the script which was
done in the Fall of 1958. Unfortunately, after two weeks of shooting the
powerful opening Death Valley Mines Sequence still in the film today, Mann
was fired, probably because of "creative disagreements" with Douglas. He
went on to make such critically acclaimed films as the medieval epic El
Cid and the sword and sandal blockbuster Fall of the Roman Empire, both of
which are justly famous for their tremendous battle scenes. As Spartacus
producer Eddie Lewis remarked in an interview, "If it had been up to Tony
Mann, we would have used up ten reels for the final battle."
As his western film's attest, Mann believed, far more than Kubrick, in
mythic heroes as the proper subject for film and was in fact, a perfect
choice to direct this ancient "western in togas". For Mann, the western
"has the essential pictorial qualities...it is legend -- and legend makes
the very best cinema; it excites the imagination more...legend is a
concept of characters greater than life." His creative philosophy meshed
neatly with Fast's conception because he believed that "the nobility of
the human spirit...this is what drama is. This is what pictures are all
about. I don't believe in anything else." As for strict historical
accuracy, like Fast, Mann believed that "the most important thing is that
you get the feeling of history. The actual facts, very few people know."
[1] Thus, the soon-to-be creator of El Cid could hardly have had any
difficulties with presenting on screen the story of another
larger-than-life legendary hero of old.
Neither can screenwriter Dalton Trumbo be saddled with the
responsibility for the film's failure to live up to the novel's potential.
While altering much of the book's plot and character development in order
to conform to the needs of a cinematic treatment, he nevertheless
insisted, through five versions of the script, on retaining Fast's basic
historical conception of Spartacus's nearly successful revolutionary
challenge to Imperial Rome.
Neither can fault be found with executive producer Kirk Douglas. In
his autobiography, The Ragman's Son, he described his personal conception
of the historical Spartacus, based on his reading of the Fast novel.
Unfortunately, the three principle filmmakers had to contend with the
interference of their primary financial backer, Universal Studios, whose
head, Ed Muhl, had some very different ideas, leading to what Trumbo
described as "a basic conflict of opinion about the dimensions of
Spartacus and his struggle, a conflict which has been in evidence from the
earliest beginnings of the project". Originally Muhl never really
conceived of Spartacus as a "spectacle" or "blockbuster" but rather as an
intimate film costing between $3 and $4 million. A personal friend of
Trumbo's and the man who officially broke the Hollywood blacklist, Muhl
too wanted to make an exciting, historically accurate film. He was
particularly fascinated by the struggles between the liberal and
conservative Roman senatorial factions, transparent analogues to
contemporary American politics which the writer had injected into the
script. But, as he told this author: "Deep ideas are nice to have in a
picture. But what counts is audience appeal."
In response to the Douglas concept of Spartacus, Muhl remarked:
"it's understandable that Kirk would want to build up his own part but
that's not what the picture was about", concluding: "We did what
was possible under the circumstances...You know that phrase, 'the art of
the possible'". His attitude probably hardened when late in 1959
persistent rumors of new Hollywood hearings by the House Un-American
Activities Committee began to surface and when a full-scale right-wing
attack on the film began after it was revealed by Walter Winchell that
blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo was the author of the screenplay. Thus,
despite the fact that Spartacus was the first truly independent production
bankrolled by Universal, in the end Muhl's cautious approach prevailed
because he and the studio still held the trump card: the legal right to
make the final cut.
Although Douglas still claims that Spartacus represents the
fulfillment of his personal vision, the actor/auteur was ultimately forced
to go along with most of Muhl's program because, by insisting that Dalton
Trumbo be given official credit for the screenplay, he had set the picture
on a perilous collision course with the Far Right and the Hollywood
blacklist. As he wrote in his autobiography, The Ragman's Son:
Despite his perhaps understandable determination to exercise extreme
caution, it was Trumbo, along with Fast, who fought most consistently for
a film which would remain faithful to the essential message of the novel:
man's potential capacity, in all ages, to rise up and overthrow tyranny
and oppression. From the very beginning of his work on the film, Trumbo
waged a stubborn, heroic campaign to include scenes, or at least a battle
montage, which would depict some of Spartacus's great victories over the
Romans. On the advice of Howard Fast, he added an enormous five page
montage to his first draft script of July 15, 1958. This montage,
narrated by the Roman Senator Gracchus, traced the whole course of the
war, including many of Spartacus's most important victories. Similarly,
on Fast's recommendation, the relatively brief treatment of Spartacus's
first victory over Glabrus and the garrison of Rome was greatly expanded
at an estimated cost of $300,000, to a major sequence encompassing four
scenes. At the same time, the final battle was de-emphasized: the
audience was to hear the sounds of battle but not see the action. The
emphasis would be placed on the bloody aftermath. Following the novel,
the idea appears to have been to underscore Spartacus's many great
victories but to downplay his final defeat.
Other forces were at work however as the film moved towards
production. By the third draft (known as the Final Screenplay) of
December 9, 1958, the huge battle montage had disappeared and the Glabrus
battle had been reduced to a narration, while plans were underway for a
detailed rendition of the final battle. To counterbalance this, the story
was now told in flashback and opened with a speech by Crassus to his staff
officers in which he refers to nine Roman armies destroyed by Spartacus
during the course of the war and warns of the possible fall of Rome.
Because the filmmakers had to finish the Roman sections of the script
first in order to attract the great British actors and then to rush into
production in order to beat another film company which was also preparing
a film about Spartacus based on Arthur Koestler's novel, The Gladiators,
the slave sections of the script were still unfinished and in need of
extensive rewriting when shooting began on January 27, 1959. Thus, by the
end of May 1959, as the script was again being revised, Trumbo was able to
insert first one and then four of his proposed battle montages depicting
seven or eight slave victories. These montages were calculated to lend
credibility to a new Kubrick inspired plot change in which the
overconfident slaves throw away their chance to escape on the waiting
pirate fleet and instead decide to try to overthrow the whole slave system
by marching on Rome. Trumbo believed these battle montages were crucial
to the success of the film. In a memo from this period, he wrote:
"Since that time I have written ceaselessly to try to make the script
as good as at least a few people thought it was in those first remote days
of its conception.... Many scenes have been improved. Other scenes, I
regret to say, have been diminished ...
"For the past three months the script has been written by a committee
rather than by a writer. Everything has been thrown at me: hostile
Koestlerian ideas derived from quite another book: rhetorical speeches and
character gems from the newly discovered Fast script which should have
been read months and months ago; psychiatric observations which I have
found to be of immense value; the rival opinions of actors: the director's
opinion (possibly correct) that the words don't matter anyhow so long as
they're simple, and that any attempt with speech to provoke thought or
illuminate intellectual, political, or moral concepts simply confuses the
audience: a widespread conviction that complexity has no place on the
screen, and that simplicity is best brought out by action alone: every
possible attempt at swift and easy solutions to the problem of a script
which is essentially complex and therefore is bound to have a certain
complexity of motives (as you have discovered in ten versions of the
climax) ...
"I have gone through a process of inquisition on this script that
rivals any torment devised by a committee of Congress. The difference is
that one can tell the committee to go fuck itself and stop the ordeal,
whereas considerations of friendship, mutual respect, professional
obligation, and ... forgive the words ... artistic commitment and
devotion, prevent such an escape from present circumstances.
"I am prepared to admit that democratically the votes of a fulltime
actor, a full-time director, and a full-time producer are worth three
times the dissent of a fulltime writer. They are also worth three times
the vote of a competent secretary, which is what I have lately become.
"[However], there are moments in the history of the drama when the vote
of one full-time writer outweighs and outnumbers the votes of any three
who are so fully occupied in other professions that they are for the
present, unable themselves to do the writing. . .
"[Since] it is as necessary to you -more necessary!- as to me that the
script be finished on a crash basis ... if there is no better method, let
us go back to the old fashioned idea that by and large the best man to
invent a story and write a script is a writer."[5]
For want of a better term, Trumbo labelled the Two Conflicting Points
of View on Spartacus as "The Large Spartacus" and "The Small Spartacus."
The fundamental premise of the Large Spartacus was that Spartacus's revolt
was a major rebellion which shook the Roman Republic to its very
foundations, that involved a series of brilliant slave military campaigns
and the defeat of the best Rome had to offer, and that was finally only
put down by the overwhelming, combined might of three Roman armies. The
premise of the Small Spartacus was that the revolt was more on the scale
of a jail-break and subsequent dash to the sea, that during its course
there were no important slave victories over the Romans, and that it was
put down by only one Roman army.
Trumbo then listed an entire series of other conflicting conceptions
about the picture and its main character which flowed from these basic
premises. He made it clear that he believed that only one of these
conceptions could be right and that the right choice was the Large
Spartacus. With considerable justification he asserted that the conscious
intention of the executive committee had been, through all three
preliminary drafts of the screenplay, to construct a film around the
concept of the Large Spartacus. In his view, the basic problem with the
film was a slow turn toward the Small View through the endless rewrites of
the Final Screenplav after shooting had begun. He pleaded with the
committee to embrace the Large Spartacus "without any reservations ...
otherwise we shall be utterly lost."
After reading the Report, when asked by Kubrick how Trumbo had liked
the film's first rough cut, Douglas replied, "He didn't like it! And he's
right." Douglas still refers to Trumbo's Report as "the most brilliant
analysis of movie-making that I have ever read." Much to Kubrick's
chagrin, Douglas and Lewis decided to significantly revise the film even
though this would entail considerable additional expense. All the key
players' contracts were extended and a number of revised or new scenes
containing Large Spartacus dialog were shot starting in November 1959.
These included the two scenes with the pirate envoy Tigranes Levantus
(Herbert Lom), Spartacus's speech to the gladiators after their return to
the gladiator school, his speech to the assembled slaves on the beach near
Brundisium, and the last dialog and confrontation between Spartacus,
Antoninus, and Crassus.
On the question of the battle montages, however, Trumbo apparently
failed to fully persuade Douglas and Universal. Just at this time,
August, 1959, more money had been obtained for battle scenes from
Universal and the decision had been made to move the production to Spain
to shoot the final battle as well as a number of other scenes with the
help of the Spanish army. The question was whether or not the battle
montages showing the slave army's victories were also going to be shot.
According to Spartacus editor Robert Lawrence , "the idea [of shooting
full blown additional battle scenes] was discussed, but it was never
actually done" because the money was not forthcoming from Universal. In
fact, as part of the agreement of August 4, 1959 between Douglas' company
Bryna Films and Universal Studios, six days of these slave victory
scenes were to filmed in Spain as part of a total of twelve days of battle
scenes at an estimated cost of half a million dollars. However, when
Douglas came back with Trumbo's proposals from his Report on Spartacus for
a large number of additional scenes to be shot in Spain, the deal was
renegotiated. The new agreement of October 21, 1959 called for a total of
twenty-two days of shooting in Spain the following month at an estimated
cost of nearly a million dollars. However, the number of shooting days
for battle scenes was cut down to six, enough to accommodate the final
battle but not the early slave victories. The studio argued ingenuously
that if the slave victory scenes were too good they could detract from the
impact of the final battle. But if they were lackluster, then they would
detract from the quality of the picture. Instead, Douglas had to fall back
on the idea of using a brief animated "battle map" to dramatize these
slave victories.
In an Appendix to an Outline of the scenes to be shot in Spain, Trumbo
made a final plea for the shooting of full scale battle montages:
Evidence collected by the author over the last few years strongly
suggests that despite Douglas and Trumbo's determination to build
Spartacus around the concept of The Large Spartacus, during and after the
editing process Universal Studios deliberately censored this film's
explosive historical content in order to keep it within the confines of
the implicitly established mass media limits of acceptable political
discourse circa 1959. Despite the vigorous objections of Douglas, Kubrick,
and Trumbo, Universal's unwillingnes to confront the prevailing political
myth of the inevitable failure or degeneration of social revolution
resulted in the elimination of nearly a dozen dialogue and action
sequences which fostered the hope that Spartacus's rebellion might
actually have succeeded in destroying Rome. These cuts included such
slave victory scenes as the "Battle of Luceria", the "Battle Map
Metapontum" and the lengthier "Battle of Metapontum". Four additional
sequences were slated for elimination but later restored thanks to the
determined resistance of the filmmakers and the fortuitous opposition of
the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency. (For details see the author's
"Spartacus: Still Censored After All These Years", Cineaste, Summer 1995,
or Internet Movie Database ). Unlike the other conventional cuts imposed
on the film by the studio censors for language, sex, violence, and nudity,
these political excisions were intended to eliminate Trumb's whole concept
of the Large Spartacus and replace it with the "Small", or at best the
"Medium" Spartacus. So bitter did the struggle between Douglas and
Universal Studios head Ed Muhl over the final content of the film become
that Muhl agreed to speak with this author only on the condition that,
conflicts between the personalities involved, now thirty years in the
past, would not be discussed.
The picture went through sweeping changes during the editing process,
particularly in the section between the beginning of the slaves' trek
across Italy and the end of their victorious march at the seaport of
Brindusium. According to supervising editor Irving Lerner, the struggle
over the final content of the film became so intense that Universal
executives, in an unprecedented move, periodically came right into the
editing room and ordered him to reinstate or delete individual scenes,
overriding Douglas' instructions. As a result, a number of scenes,
particularly those featuring Charles Laughton, went in and out of the
picture several times. The process of arriving at a final cut on which
Lerner, Douglas, Kubrick and Muhl could even temporarily agree dragged on
for so long that Lerner was finally forced to walk off the picture in
order to begin directing his own film, STUDS LONIGAN.
In January 1960 the filmmakers made their opening move. They inserted
a six second battle scene, the "Battle of Lucaria", depicting Spartacus's
first great victory over the legions, into the film following the first
big slave march from Mt. Vesuvius to Luceria. At the same time they
decided to go ahead with the Battle Map using the rejected battle footage
from Spain as well as titles naming the sites of a series of great slave
victories. To this end they inserted a ten second sequence, probably
containing more Spanish battle scenes, titled "Battle Map Metapontum",
following the second big slave march from Luceria to Metapontum.
There is also some evidence suggesting that following Canutt's five
days of shooting in early February, the filmmakers decided to use a much
longer battle map montage in place of the Battle of Lucaria and the Battle
Map Metapontum. In a post-production scheduling memorandum dated February
12, 1960 to Universal studio head Ed Muhl, Universal creative head Mel
Tucker, Spartacus producer Eddie Lewis and editor Bob Lawrence, Universal
Editorial Department Chief Sid Lund requested that "In addition, the
number, design and timing of the map inserts for the battle sequences
should be finalized as soon as possible." However, the evidence
indicates that the studio quickly changed its mind and that by the
beginning of March the filmmakers had been forced to drop the lengthy
battle montage in favor of the ten second battle map. The "Battle of
Lucaria" also disappeared as part of a series of sweeping changes in the
film between the beginning of the slaves' victorious campaign at Mt.
Vesuvius and their arrival at the sea.
Nevertheless, six weeks later, following the screening of the now
edited film for Universal President Rackmil and other top executives from
New York, the filmmakers were once again able to turn the tide and proceed
with the insertion of one major battle sequence ending with a great slave
victory into the middle section of the film, between the ten second Battle
Map Metapontum and the triumphal March into Metapontum which followed.
This sequence, for which composer Alex North wrote a pencil sketch score
entitled Battle of Metapontum, is cited in the post-editing April 13, 1960
Revised Music Notes with the annotation, "Not in as yet."
Over the next six weeks a number of cut scenes and sequences were
reinstated in the picture and the revised film was screened again for the
top Universal publicity people and their wives at the end of May. These
reinserted sequences included the crucial Balcony Scene in which Gracchus
permanently alienates Caesar by suggesting that, judging from his
unprecedented record of success, Spartacus might well defeat Crassus
and perhaps take Rome itself, a prospect which he frankly prefers to the
death of the Republic at the hands of Crassus.
However, during this same period the Battle of Metapontum was either
cancelled or deleted from the film. Finally, as the July 26 date for the
press screening approached, the studio unilaterally eliminated the Battle
Map Metapontum and the Balcony Scene from the Final Preview Version. With
these final cuts, the elaborate constellation of remaining scenes in the
film which delineated the figure of the Large Spartacus became almost
invisible to the casual viewer. The result was not only a depressing film,
but in large sections, a boring one, lacking in dramatic tension.
Trumbo and Douglas ultimately failed to save any of the scenes depicting
Spartacus's great victories from the studio censors. Thus, despite all the
dialogue which Trumbo was able to insert in the retakes, pointing in the
direction of the Large Spartacus, the action, which is the crucial element
in a motion picture, still carries the day for the Small Spartacus. In
fact, the picture of the slave revolt which finally emerges is almost
exactly what Trumbo characterized as the Small View, namely, "a jailbreak
followed by a simple dash to the sea", rather than "a series of brilliant
slave military campaigns, the defeat of the best Rome had to offer." Just
as Trumbo predicted, the result was a film which, despite a promising
beginning, was ultimately a failure. It is a film about the life of a
"man who led an inspired crusade for freedom against the most powerful
state on earth, defeating in bloody battle nine of its best trained
armies" in which barely one of those defeats is ever shown. It is as if
the filmmakers had set out to make a twelve million dollar epic on the
life of Napoleon in which the only major battle the audience ever sees is
...Waterloo.
Most of the middle section of the film is dull, flat, and boring,
containing mostly filler, richly deserving The New York Times' Bosley
Crowther's flat pan, summarized in the Times' standard television capsule
review as: "Overcooked, overstuffed and overlong." And this written by a
sympathetic critic who hastened to add: "But visually striking, often
gripping. Best single element: The Alex North score." The banality of
most of the film fully justifies Kubrick's own disavowal of it.
The only even slightly exciting scene in this section of the film is
the first battle in which Spartacus triumphs over Roman might as he leads
a successful attack on the camp of Glabrus and the garrison of Rome. But
it is a battle without combat. Except for two Roman soldiers going down
in flames at the outset, there are no scenes of violence in it at all - no
fighting, no killing, no bodies, no Roman soldiers in evidence
whatsoever. From all appearances, the slaves overrun a Roman camp which
is virtually deserted and already in flames. The scene seems designed by
a poverty row producer, with all the punch of a made-for TV movie.
Violence, particularly successful violence by the oppressed, has been
written out of it.
Following this first (and last) slave victory, the film degenerates
into boredom. The audience has been primed to cheer the hero and hiss the
villain, but it never gets that opportunity, at least not until the end
of the film when the denouement is a fait accompli. What it does get is
scene after scene of walking, talking, more walking, more talking. some
verbal accounts of unseen actions and then ... still more talking. Yes,
there is the visually striking sequence of thousands of slaves flocking to
join the slave army as it marches across Italy. The warm affection of the
audience for the main characters and the anonymous members of the slave
horde continues to grow while the Roman politicians plot and maneuver.
But by the time Varinia finishes breasting the waves and informs Spartacus
that she is pregnant, the camera cuts to the slaves on the march and then
... nothing happens, the audience has likely fallen asleep, to reawaken.
perhaps, when Tigranes delivers his message of doom, perhaps not until the
climactic battle scene, perhaps never.
This was clearly not the story Trumbo wanted to tell. In the first
scene between Spartacus and the pirate envoy Tigranes, his dialog is
calculated to create the suspense needed to sustain the second half of the
film. Can Spartacus and the slaves hope to overcome the formidable
natural obstacles which block their path, can they survive the lethal
dangers inherent in "fighting a major battle in every town." Isn't their
cause, in fact, doomed from the outset, or can they somehow make it to the
sea and freedom? If they do, it will be a miracle. And that's what Trumbo
was saying, that Spartacus's heroic campaign was a miracle of the human
spirit.
For Trumbo, the rest of the film was to consist of scenes alternating
between the love story, the slave community, and the Roman political
struggle, with all this punctuated by a series of bitter battle scenes and
successive victories for the slaves over larger and larger Roman armies.
Somehow, despite the tremendous, power arrayed against them, they
actually succeed in reaching Brundisium and, hopefully, freedom.
But again the intervention of Crassus, the outsider, frustrates their
plan, precipitating a crisis. Crassus bribes the pirates and the slaves
are left in the lurch. They must now face the greatest test of all, the
combined might of three Roman armies. The crisis is resolved in the final
battle in which the slave army, despite heroic resistance, is finally
destroyed. The aftermath of the battle reinforces the bond between the
slaves and the man who has led them through this epic struggle when the
survivors, refuse to betray Spartacus to the Romans at the cost of their
own lives.
This was the epic plot line for which Trumbo was fighting, not the
bland Hollywood pablum we have today. Even worse, the consequences of
failing to heed his advice were just as fatal for the development of the
film's main character as they were for its storyline.
Trumbo saw Spartacus at the outset as almost an animal, an angry,
brawling, rebellious slave, reacting to insult and abuse with primitive
violence. The time bomb within him finally explodes in the revolt of the
gladiators. Like Fast's character, Spartacus experiences personal growth
as he rises to leadership of the rebellion and deepens his romantic
relationship with Varinia. Gradually he begins to understand the hopes
and needs of others, and finally identifies himself with the yearning for
freedom of humanity as a whole. Through this character development,
Trumbo wanted to make Spartacus into a spokesman for, and a living symbol
of, man's passion for freedom. As he conceived it:
In the field of action, the elimination of almost all violent
conflict from the film served to frustrate Trumbo's purpose and seal the
fate of the Large Spartacus. In the early parts of the film Trumbo was
able to develop his character from a violent, primitive rebel into a
charismatic leader with a warm, loveable personality. But what is
missing, what is lacking, in most of the later sections of the picture, is
the original Spartacus, that angry rebel against injustice. Where is the
mine slave who hamstrung an overseer with his teeth, the gladiator who
fought desperately for life in the arena, the enraged rebel who drowned
his gladiatorial trainer in a vat of soup, bashed in the brains of one
guard and stabbed another in the throat? Where is the anger and the
passion that are the character's defining qualities, his very raison
d'etre? They have all but disappeared.
How could this have happened? The opportunity for Spartacus to
demonstrate his hatred of injustice, his passion for freedom, only
presents itself in moments of confrontation. But, beginning with its
purely symbolic version of the attack on Glabrus's camp, the film eschews
all truly violent confrontation, and thus the character never gets that
opportunity. The fact that Spartacus never draws his sword in anger for
nearly two full hours, from the breakout at the gladiators' school until
late in the final battle, demonstrates the degree to which the heroic
gladiator has been emasculated in this film.
What, then, is left of the character? In attempting to develop
Spartacus into the dialectical opposite of Crassus, Trumbo succeeded,
perhaps through no fault of his own, in nearly turning him into his
rival's mirror image. Instead of fighting arms in hand, alongside his
men, he rides in on a horse after the battle is virtually over, or watches
from afar until a dire emergency forces him to join the fray. He sets
tasks for others to perform while he does virtually all the thinking. His
followers obey him without question. His affair with Varinia becomes
equally conventional. In sum, Spartacus has risen from his lowly status
as a primitive rebel to attain, dare I say it, middle class
respectability!
Of course, neither Dalton Trumbo nor Stanley Kubrick intended to turn
Spartacus into a Hollywood cliche, a studio formula. His character was
supposed to develop from a primitive rebel into a mature, democratic
leader, not into a military strongman or a corporate executive. But
without something substantial for the character to do, his persona simply
withers on the vine. His rival, Crassus, becomes a much more compelling
personality almost until the film's final conflict.
How this final battle was handled forms a veritable line of
demarcation between the two conflicting viewpoints on Spartacus because,
by this time, with the near demise of the main character, the slave army
itself has become the main protagonist of the story. Either we view the
slaves fundamentally as the pathetic, innocent victims of a cynical Roman
genocide and thereby perceive Spartacus as a benighted Pied Piper
unwittingly leading them to their doom; or we view them as fallen heroes,
warriors in a noble cause who, through their heroic sacrifice, have
transcended their own time and place to reach immortality.
Trumbo, of course, fought for the second, heroic alternative. He
initially argued at length in the August 1959 revision of the script's
first draft against actually showing the final battle. The audience, he
said, will already know the outcome and what really counts is the battle's
aftermath. Once the decision had been made to eliminate the battle
montage showing Spartacus's victories, however, it was inevitable that
the final battle scene would have to be filmed since, without at least one
major battle, this epic story of a bloody slave revolt would have become a
complete bore and a surefire bomb at the box office.
Thus, while continuing his fight to insert battle scenes or montages
into the film, Trumbo also struggled to make the facts surrounding
Spartacus's defeat into an even greater measure of his power and
greatness. In the actual historical events, Crassus, after suffering
several defeats at the hands of the slaves and even resorting to
decimating his own troops, was forced to write to the Senate requesting
the recall of his main political rival Pompey from Spain and Lucullus from
Thrace. The clear implication was that without them he could offer no
guarantees about the outcome should Spartacus choose to march on Rome.
Later, however, when, as a result of divisions within the slave army, his
fortunes began to improve, and word reached him that Pompey had crossed
the Alps into Northern Italy, Crassus, "more forward to fight than
became a prudent commander," threw caution to the winds and decided "at
considerable risk" to precipitate a decisive battle with Spartacus before
Pompey arrived on the scene to rob him of all the glory. As a result of
this brash initiative, he came perilously close to being defeated by the
slaves since during the battle he was forced to take the rare and
unusually desperate action for a Roman commander of exposing his own
person on the front lines in order to rally his faltering men "although
he was considered even by his friends to be a brave man anywhere but in
the field."[8] But Crassus "had good fortune" because, as Spartacus and
the slaves "made straight for Crassus, charging through arms and wounded
men" the heroic slave leader was crippled by a dart in the thigh and,
while defending himself to the last, fighting on his knees, was cut to
pieces. The ancient writer Athenaes says flatly that if Spartacus "had
not been killed in this battle with Crassus he would have caused [the
Romans] no ordinary sweat as [the slave leader] Eunus did in Sicily"
where, half a century before, revolting slaves had held half the island
for perhaps ten years against eight Roman expeditions.
Taking a few liberties with history, Trumbo insisted that the slave
army be overcome by the combined might of the three Roman armies of
Crassus, Pompey and Lucullus, rather than that of Crassus alone. His
objective was to make clear to the audience that, had the armies of Pompey
and Lucullus failed to arrive in time, Spartacus would actually have
defeated Crassus and perhaps taken Rome. The feelings and actions of all
the main characters - and most especially of Crassus - in the concluding
section of the film are predicated on this fundamental premise.
The dialogue which Trumbo wrote to precede this final battle was meant
to lend credibility to this idea. Following Trumbo's original Final
Screenplay, the first rough cut of Spartacus was constructed in the form
of a flashback from the eve of this battle, with an opening scene which
now appears late in the film as Crassus and his aides gallop on horseback
into the Roman encampment. Once inside his command tent, Crassus greets
his waiting staff officers, receives their briefing on his army's
readiness, and surprisingly informs them that all dispositions are to be
changed. He then launches into a summary (known as the film's Original
Prologue) of the course of the war up to this point. His words are the
film's definitive statement of the historic stature and accomplishments of
its main character:
"The question is this: Why has a rabble of slaves been able to
destroy the best troops the world ever saw? To answer that question you
must understand that rabble. And most particularly, you must understand
the man who commands them."
During the rewriting and reediting process which followed the
acceptance of Trumbo's Report, it was decided to eliminate the flashback
and open the film by going directly to the mine scene using a new
voiceover prologue. The film's original opening was shifted and combined
with its continuation late in the picture. At Trumbo's insistence,
Olivier also returned to shoot some new lines for this scene referring to
the anticipated arrival of the armies of Pompey and Lucullus.
However, even as other new scenes containing Large Spartacus dialog
were being filmed, all the "nine Roman armies" dialog from the Original
Prologue was eliminated from this scene. Reportedly this was done not out
of any desire to reduce the stature of Spartacus, but simply in the normal
course of editing. It was felt that the story told up to that scene could
stand on its own without hitting the audience over the head with a verbal
recounting, even by Laurence Olivier. During further editing, however,
that story was deprived of its essential element: the battle montage
showing the destruction of those nine Roman armies. The result was a
complete reversal of the tone and meaning of the film as it builds to its
climax. Instead of tense expectation on the part of the Romans, we get
the smug assurance of easy victory.
Without Crassus's warning of possible defeat, most of the suspense is
lost. The result is almost a foregone conclusion. All the time, money,
and effort expended to film the final (and only real) battle in Spartacus
are largely wasted because, just as Trumbo predicted, the audience knows
perfectly well what the outcome is going to be before the battle has even
begun. In this context. Crassus's references to the 'legend of
Spartacus' become ludicrous, almost sarcastic. The attempt to make the
battle more exciting by making it appear that the slaves are winning
during its opening moments falls flat because there are no close-ups of
Olivier reacting with fear as his battle plans go awry when the slaves put
his advance guard to flight, break through the lines, and engage his
legionnaires one-on-one. The appearance of the armies of Pompey and
Lucullus almost immediately after the fighting has begun quickly squelches
any hopes that somehow the slave army might still win.
Trumbo's three Roman armies idea was a dramatic device, completely devoid
of any historical validity, designed to explain to the audience how the
heroic slave army, led by a man of genius like Spartacus, fighting in such
a noble cause, having destroyed nine Roman armies in a series of brilliant
campaigns, could still finally be vanquished. Unfortunately, the
elimination from the film of any depiction or even mention of these nine
Roman disasters made this device backfire. Instead of serving as a
measure of Crassus's fear of the slave army, the vast extent of the forces
he mobilizes against it simply underscores the overwhelming superiority of
Roman military power, a power which no rebellion, no matter how inspired,
can long hope to challenge. This fatalistic vision is the very inverse of
the theme of the novel and of Trumbo's script as well: that no empire, no
matter how powerful, can ultimately prevail over the force of humanity's
passion for freedom.
The elimination of the battle montage together with the film's
Original Prologue not only gravely weakened the dramatic impact of the
final battle, it also thoroughly undermined the motivation for Olivier's
brilliant portrayal of Crassus in the aftermath of the conflict. Crassus
embodies the delusions of grandeur of the decadent Roman aristocracy based
on its conquest of most of the known world, as well as its deep-seated
fear of the human spoils of those conquests, the slaves. This fear
remains repressed only so long as the victims passively accept their
fate. As soon as some form of rebellion or resistance develops, however,
this fear surfaces and, with it, both a real vulnerability and a ruthless
determination to crush any form of opposition. This guilt-based fear is
part of the explanation for the paradox of how a military power which had
conquered most of the known world could have nearly been destroyed by an
army composed of the most pathetic victims of that conquest.
To salve their guilty consciences, the slave owners also believe in
the natural superiority of the Roman people over other races, as
evidenced particularly on the battlefield. For them power becomes its own
moral justification. The idea that the slaves could be superior to the
Romans in this or any other field is particularly threatening.
Moreover, a class of slave owners whose entire existence is bound up
with the violent conquest and enslavement of other peoples, and with the
exaction of obedience through intimidation, must inevitably lose touch
with the ability to give and receive genuine human warmth and affection.
The terrible price for their grandeur is the loss of the power to love or
to be worthy of love. For love, as Varinia reminds Crassus, cannot be
compelled by force but must be given freely. It cannot be bought but can
only be given in exchange for itself.
Thus, although not a physical coward, Crassus freezes in guilty
terror when Draba (Woody Strode) launches his desperate suicidal attack
early in the film. He cannot even rise from his chair or draw his dagger
to defend himself from an unarmed gladiator until the man is already half
dead. He shrinks from the horrible truth about himself and the system of
power he worships that is inherent in Draba's rejection of the role of
executioner. Even as Draba lies dying, Olivier plays Crassus as a shaken,
almost terrified man. His fear re-surfaces when Antoninus, faced with his
sexual advances, rejects him and escapes to join Spartacus. Similarly,
Gracchus's speech to the Senate, warning of Crassus's intention to
establish a dictatorship, frightens him with the realization that all his
fine speeches about restoring the ancient traditions of Rome are just a
cover for his own ruthless ambition.
All these barely concealed anxieties finally come to a head during
the final battle. In history, although Crassus was sent with an enormous
force of at least ten legions against Spartacus, "his mission was not an
easy one and he was frequently outgeneraled by the slave; but after
suffering several humiliating defeats he destroyed the main body of
Spartacus's troops." Unfortunately, just as Crassus feared, Pompey arrived
from Spain in time to wipe out a small band of fugitives from this battle
and used this feat to claim that while Crassus had defeated the slaves in
a pitched battle, he had finally ended the war for good. Pompey celebrated
a magnificent triumph for his victory over the rebel Sertorius in Spain
and was elected consul although he was not even yet a member of the
Senate. Crassus, however, had to be satisfied with the lesser honor of an
ovation for his dearly bought victory over the slaves and was even forced
to swallow his pride and seek Pompey's support in order to be elected
second consul with him. Moreover "military defeat at the hands of a slave
brought a stigma which Crassus could never forget and which darkened his
mind for many years to come."[9]
Following this historical interpretation, Trumbo intended the final
battle to be the traumatic event which triggers the deep fear inside
Crassus which has emerged periodically earlier in the film, sending him
into a wild rampage of senseless cruelty and a pathetic attempt to compete
with Spartacus for the love of Varinia. But the film fails to realize
Trumbo' s intention because there is nothing in it which would convey the
idea that Crassus had experienced any fear whatsoever during that
battle. In fact, while this battle is filled with close-ups of Kirk
Douglas as Spartacus directing his army and then participating personally
in the fighting, the feelings and reactions of Crassus in the person of
Laurence Olivier are virtually absent from this climactic confrontation
between the film's two main antagonists.
During the shooting of the retakes following Trumbo's Report, two new
reaction shots of Crassus and his staff watching the final battle were
filmed: the first coinciding with the slave army igniting their flaming,
rolling barricades, thus upsetting the Roman battle plan: the second with
the arrival of the armies of Pompey and Lucullus, turning the tide against
the slaves. But, in contradiction to the filmmakers' express written
intentions, the mid-range rather than the close-up versions of these shots
were used, completely obscuring the anxiety filled emotional reactions of
Crassus (revealed only by close inspection) to these two decisive turning
points in the battle.
Here Trumbo missed a golden opportunity to characterize the real
motivation for the fear which Crassus expresses during the rest of the
film. Instead he spent all his efforts in a futile attempt to include
some lines by Crassus about the heroism of the slave women and the love
between the slaves. Trumbo believed the message of these lines was
crucial to the entire picture and was horrified when, without his
knowledge, they were cut from the script.
"If, after all the effort that went into the writing of what could
have been an absolutely superb moment ... a moment essential to the
intellectual and spiritual comprehension of what this film is about... if
these were cut from the script before shooting, and if no one consulted me
about the cut (which no one did) then I charge bad faith . . . bad faith
in relation to me, bad faith in your obligation as artists to the medium
that feeds you. And I say, you don't deserve to have a good film.
"For the cutting of these lines before they reach film represents a
final and irrevocable step in the total elimination of women from this
film; the total downgrading of the moral and heroic quality of the slave
rebellion: in the castration of Spartacus as a character of any
consequence in the film: in an obsession with the Small View of Spartacus
as almost to represent a conspiracy, a vulgar conspiracy to kill
any distinction which this film might have had.
"If we have these lines on film they should by all means go
back into the picture.... If we do not have them.. . well, I become
physically ill. Worse. . . I feel like a prisoner who wants to kill the
person responsible, who wants to yell for help ... and can do nothing
about it except type more words ... words that have lost all meaning ...
words that die in the void like an idiot's dream shouted from the bottom
of a cistern. I mean that."[10]
Fortunately, Kubrick did embrace the visual ideas in Trumbo's script
and preserved much of what he was trying to convey. His images of peace
and serenity on the faces of the dead slaves as the camera pans across the
battlefield, their bodies locked in a last embrace, powerfully conveys
their nobility, their courage, and the love they felt for one another to
the very end.
Trumbo's intention was that Crassus, having come face to face with the
incredible heroism and nobility of the slaves in their finest hour,
becomes frightened and angry. Confronted by the slaves' deep love for one
another, Crassus recoils from his painful recognition of the stark
contrast between their simple humanity and the emotional barrenness of his
own life, an awareness he has tried unsuccessfully to suppress through a
compulsive struggle for material wealth and political power. His victory
has not brought him the renewed peace of mind he so desperately sought.
In Trumbo's Large Spartacus view of the film, Crassus also senses that,
without the arrival of Pompey and Lucullus, he might well have been
defeated by the slaves. Thus, Crassus desperately struggles to rid
himself of his new sense of the criminal illegitimacy of the social system
he has just barely managed to preserve. His fears lead him to try
repeatedly to regain his sense of legitimacy, but to no avail, leading to
greater excesses of irrational cruelty.
He tries to make the slaves betray Spartacus but they refuse at the
cost of their lives. He tries to force Gracchus to aid him in
establishing his dictatorship by pacifying the supporters of Roman
democracy, but Gracchus chooses suicide instead. He tries to win the love
of Varinia, using the wealth and security he can provide, but she rejects
him and escapes with Spartacus's newborn son to freedom. In his final
confrontation with Spartacus, Crassus is forced, at least momentarily, to
lose all his delusions of grandeur, as he stands frightened and deeply
wounded by the utter contempt in which Spartacus holds him.
Unfortunately, without the battle montage, the dialog from the film's
Original Prologue, or at least the close-up versions of Crassus's
reaction shots during the final conflict, there is no real basis for any
fear of defeat on the part of Crassus either before, during, or after the
battle, which would explain his almost panic-stricken attempts to regain
his sense of identity in its aftermath. Olivier's brilliant performance
has thus been robbed of all psychological motivation at key moments late
in the film, and seems more a melodramatic sop thrown to the audience as
consolation for having had to watch Spartacus's dream of freedom crushed
under the iron heel of Rome.
Trumbo's single-minded concentration on trying to reinsert Crassus's
lines expressing his lingering fear as he surveys the dead slaves resulted
in a lack of attention to Crassus's much more palpable fear of Spartacus
and the slaves while they were still alive. This misplacement of emphasis
probably stemmed from Trumbo's own confusion about the primary cause of
the terror inspired by the slave revolt within the Roman ruling class.
His emphasis on the moral and psychological threat, rather than on the
actual physical danger of destruction, flowed from his underlying belief
that, short of a general uprising, the 100,000-man slave army never had
any real chance of ultimately winning. Trumbo made this explicit in the
dialog which follows, as he engaged in a futile effort to transform the
film's depiction of the slaves' crushing defeat into some kind of moral
victory.
Like Spartacus's rebellion itself, the film about his life was an
enterprise that came heartbreakingly close to succeeding. It is
excruciatingly frustrating to consider that the re-inclusion of just a few
seconds of rejected battle scenes and excised dialogue could have changed
the whole tone of this film, tying all its contradictory elements together
into a coherent, magnificent whole. However, we cannot blame the film's
restorers for failing to bring the Large Spartacus back to life, since the
crucial missing scenes which might have been restored were presumably lost
forever when Universal junked all the film's outtakes and deleted footage
in 1975.
Nor can the ultimate responsibility for the failure of Spartacus to
realize its full potential be placed on the shoulders of the film's
Executive Producer and star, Kirk Douglas. Douglas was deeply affected by
Fast's novel. He identified personally with Spartacus and the oppressed
slaves in their revolt and he accepted as essentially true the picture
Fast painted of Spartacus as a towering genius whose rebellion nearly
destroyed the Roman Empire. He wanted his film to become a personal
declaration of principle: an American statement by an American film
company about the cause of freedom and the dignity of man. In this he
succeeded, and, in so doing, made himself into a living symbol of those
ideals around the world, travelling in the early Sixties as a goodwill
ambassador for America on behalf of the State Department ad the U.S.
Information Agency.
Nor can we really judge Universal Studios' Ed Muhl too harshly. Like
Trumbo and Douglas, Muhl recognized what a tremendous risk they were
taking in attempting to break the blacklist using the most expensive film
ever made in Hollywood. Realizing that Spartacus had to walk a fine line
between a watered down version of the same old democratic political clichˇ
s and a left wing message too strong for the palates of even the liberal
critics, Muhl felt compelled to censor Trumbo still further, after Trumbo
had already censored himself, even at the risk of badly damaging the
film's artistic integrity. Despite Bosley Crowther's shockingly harsh
review in the New York Times and some other mixed notices, Muhl still
succeeded in making Spartacus into an intelligent epic with a clearly
defined left wing theme by a previously banned writer which became a smash
success at the box office, thereby effectively breaking the blacklist.
The real blame for the failure of Spartacus to reach its full
potential as a sophisticated historical epic must fall on the shoulders of
the anti-communist McCarthyite right which was engaged in a rear-guard
action to preserve the blacklist and was thus hell-bent on destroying this
film, either by preventing its production altogether, or, failing that, by
torpedoing its chances for commercial success through politically
motivated negative reviews and noisy public protests. It was this
unrelenting attack from the right while production was in progress which
forced the studio to reshape Spartacus into a film which was far more
about Gracchus's effort to preserve the Romans' republican democracy than
it was about Spartacus's struggle to destroy their slave system.
But the historic legacy of Spartacus, and the underlying theme of
both Fast's novel and Trumbo's screenplay, went far beyond this. At their
core they affirmed a faith which, in the wake of Vietnam and Afghanistan,
we know remains true today: that oppressed peoples can rise to challenge
even the most seemingly all-powerful empire . . . and win. Sadly, the
film Universal ultimately produced, delivered, with heartrending power,
the very opposite message: that those who dare to rebel will inevitably be
crushed. All that the audience is left with is some faint hope for the
future as Varinia and her son escape to freedom. Rejecting Trumbo's
explicit advice in his "Final Retakes," Universal produced a film which
pleads with the audience to remember the truth about what Spartacus
dreamed of, while burying the truth about what he actually did.
Fortunately, through the continued worldwide popularity of Howard
Fast's magnificent novel, the historic legacy of Spartacus, his ideals,
his achievements, his myth, have managed to transcend this film's shabby
compromise with history and continue to serve as a source of hope and
inspiration for all those who still believe in the struggle for freedom.
[2] Kirk Douglas, The Ragman's Son, pg. 304 ;
[3] Kirk Douglas, The Ragman's Son, pp.323-4;
[4] Dalton Trumbo, "The Sequence on Vesuvius: Notes," pg. 2;
[5] Dalton Trumbo, "Last General Notes on Spartacus," pp. 1-2 & 5;
[6] Dalton Trumbo, "Spartacus: Material to be Shot in Spain," pg. 31;
[7] Dalton Trumbo, Report on Spartacus, Section 11, pp. 46-7;
[8] Plutarch, Life of Crassus;
[9] Joseph Ward Swain, The Ancient World, Vol.2, pp.304-5
[10] Dalton Trumbo, Report on Spartacus, Section II, pp. 46-7.
the Braveheart of the 1960's
Studio Censorship: The Hidden Cost of Breaking the Hollywood
Blacklist
"Spartacus was a real man, but if you look him up in the history books you
will find only a short paragraph about him. Rome was ashamed; this man had
almost destroyed them. They wanted to bury him. I was intrigued with the
story of Spartacus the slave, dreaming the death of slavery, driving into
the armor of Rome the wedge that would eventually destroy her."
[2]
In his recent comments on the film's laserdisc recording, Douglas
repeatedly stressed his determination to portray on screen the story of "a
slave whose vision of freedom almost overthrew the Roman Empire." Special
consultant on Spartacus Saul Bass has confirmed to this author that during
the whole time he worked on the project there was never any doubt or
wavering about this point in the minds of Douglas, producer Eddie Lewis,
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo or any of the other members of the production
company. As the shooting of the picture came to a close all the key
promotional materials produced for the film: the thumbnail plot summaries,
the comic book, the historical pamphlet, the study guide, the souvenir
book, the Soundtrack Album Program Notes, the coming attractions trailers,
the Bantam paperback edition of the Fast novel...all told the same story
of a slave revolt against Rome which won victory after victory and all but
overthrew the Empire itself.
"That night it all suddenly became very clear. I knew what name to put on
the screen [as the author of the screenplay]...The masquerade was over.
All my friends told me I was being stupid, throwing my career away. It was
a tremendous risk. At first nobody believed me...Otto Preminger called me
from New York...He was amazed that I was using Dalton Trumbo's name
openly. Soon after he held a press conference announcing that Dalton
Trumbo would be the writer of Exodus. I wasn't thinking of being a hero
and breaking the blacklist...I was just thinking of how unfair for someone
to say, 'Put my name on it. Let me get the credit for someone else's
work.'"[3]
Douglas and Trumbo were well aware of the risks involved if Spartacus
did not earn back well over the $12 million the studio had invested in it.
As Trumbo wrote in one of his letters, "If the film had failed, neither I
nor any other blacklisted writer would ever have been able to work again."
Therefore, as Trumbo himself acknowledged, in the climate of the late
fifties, the characters in Spartacus had to espouse ideas far less radical
than he would have liked, in order to save the film from destruction at
the hands of both conservative and liberal anti-communist critics. As he
told David Chandler in an interview:
Trumbo: "You see, the bloody fight to express ideas, even mild
ones, is really recurrent and it will happen again in a different form,
maybe more severely, maybe less severely. The pressure is always on and we
writers do discipline ourselves, we do censor ourselves. For example, you
know how carefully I have to write a script, particularly if my name is
going to be on it.
If Trumbo himself saw the necessity of engaging in a degree of
self-censorship in order to break the blacklist, it is easy to understand
how Ed Muhl could insist on toning down the film still further in order to
play safe, even if it meant seriously weakening its overall dramatic
impact by reducing the legendary stature of its main protagonist to
run-of-the-mill proportions. Thus, as the July 26, 1960 screening of the
film for the press approached, Universal unilaterally eliminated some
crucial dialogue and battle footage which dramatized the legend of
Spartacus from the Final Preview Version as part of a series of 42
wide-ranging studio cuts and trims made according to Muhl, "for content,
not for length." Ten days after the press screening, following eight
months of deliberation, Universal finally took the plunge and, spurred on
by a favorable ruling from the Screenwriters' Guild, announced that
Dalton Trumbo would receive credit as the sole author of the Spartacus
screenplay. Universal thereby became the first major studio to openly and
(as events would prove) successfully challenge the blacklist. However,
with these last crucial cuts the whole basis for the legendary heroic
Spartacus of Fast, Trumbo, Mann and Douglas had now been eliminated from
the film.
Chandler: I thought you were very bold in Spartacus.
Trumbo: Well, I thought I was very restrained....because I realized
that a thing which any other writer would say and would never be thought
of or analyzed or would never be significant or noticed, when I say it, it
becomes highly significant--smuggling in propaganda and doing all sorts of
things, so you see I consider this a very mild script.The Battle Over the Script: Dalton Trumbo's Struggle For the Large
Spartacus
"And this brings us down to a basic conflict of opinion about the
dimensions of Spartacus and his struggle: a conflict which has been in
evidence from the earliest beginnings of the project. Through three
versions of the script I have fought against the idea of diminishing the
scope of Spartacus' activities, against shortening to the point of
absurdity the length of time in which he held the field, against the idea
that he was a mere escapee who won a few encounters against provincial
garrisons instead of a great military leader who for four years running
defeated the finest legions and the greatest armies Rome could put in the
field against him. You cannot have a Roman story in which Spartacus
motivates the actions of the most powerful men in Rome and shakes Roman
society to its very foundations, and then go to a Spartacus story in which
Spartacus is merely the head of a large gang of runaway convicts. Thus
far the larger concept of Spartacus' power and ability, and of the scope
of his military ventures, has won through; not I feel because I really
convinced anyone of the dramatic necessities of my view, but rather
because it takes nine months to make a baby and a man who has to stay in
the field for nine months obviously has to be doing something."[4]
Unfortunately, Trumbo was still blacklisted while working on the film.
His work on the screenplay was the worst-kept secret in Hollywood, but the
pretense had to be maintained that Edward Lewis was writing the script.
Trumbo was literally banned from the lot, unable to be present on the set
when last minute changes were being made to the script and, generally
speaking, frozen out of the decision-making loop. In another memo, he
complained bitterly about the changes in the script which had been forced
upon him while production was underway:
"It is almost a year now since I began to write this script. Since
then I have turned out hundreds upon hundreds of pages and well over
200,000 words. In its more primitive stages, before the underlying theory
of the script was challenged, before an unremitting attack on the
political meaning and the intellectual content of every scene was begun,
the script was able to attractive five top stars, several millions of
dollars from a studio, and even to generate a little excitement, a certain
enthusiasm.
Working on the film in secret from his home, locked out of the real
decision-making process during the last months of principle shooting,
reduced as he described it "to the role of a competent secretary", Trumbo
was finally smuggled onto the studio lot to view the film's first rough
cut. What he saw provoked in him such a negative, "almost physical
reaction" that he rushed home and over the next seventy-two hours wrote an
eighty page, three part "Report on Spartacus." In it he summarized what he
called "The Two Conflicting Points of View on Spartacus" which had
underscored the entire debate over the last year. Then, in a section
entitled "Scene-by-Scene Runthrough," he analyzed all the film's
weaknesses caused by innumerable on-set rewrites, done without his
knowledge or consent. He pleaded to be allowed to write a series of
retakes which he said would either make or break the film.
"During the march from Luceria to Metapontum a dozen important battles
were won by Spartacus and the slaves. I understand that a map is to be
used, with some pictorial device superimposed to indicate the sequence of
victories. Not knowing exactly how it is to be done, I have not indicated
battle montage or explosive physical scenes to indicate these victories
[in this outline]. These are left to the invention of the director. But I
think they should be taken into serious consideration, for we should let
our audience know that a sequence of victories rather than two battles
produced the slave threat to Rome."[6]
In fact, in December 1959 a significant amount of battle footage did
become available for additional battle scenes when Kubrick returned from
Spain with film of the final battle. The studio execs were awed by what
Douglas described as the "incredible footage of the [final] battle, so
wide that he [Kubrick] had to shoot from half a mile away". However, they
rejected the accompanying close-in fighting scenes as "boring and
conventional" and ordered a series of retakes featuring gory shots of
severed arms, legs and heads. Still more footage became available in early
February 1960 when the great stuntmanYakima Canutt finished directing five
days of these retakes plus numerous additional fighting scenes featuring
Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, John Ireland and Nick Dennis. To round out the
final battle, two more days of battle scenes were shot in mid-March
including several retakes with Kirk Douglas. As Spartacus editor Bob
Lawrence told this author:
" We had maps with battles and maps without battles because some people
wanted one kind and some people wanted the other. We had hundreds of feet
of [additional] battle scenes. But some people wanted it in the picture
and some people didn't."
The Battle Over the Editing: Kirk Douglas' Struggle to
Rescue The Legend from the Censors
The Plot Fizzles
The Main Character Flops: In Which A Primitive Rebel
Attains Middle-Class Respectibility
"We have given Crassus a love of something much bigger than himself:
an emotion: his love of Rome. It is for Rome (and his concept of himself
in relation to Rome) that all his thought and energy is expended. Just so
Spartacus must have a love. an emotion, that transcends himself and
Varinia: his hatred of slavery, his passion for freedom for them all. We
have given Crassus his passion: but the Small Spartacus has denied
Spartacus his passion."[7]
Unfortunately, despite the success of his Report in persuading Kirk
Douglas to authorize a number of slave story retakes, Trumbo failed to
make Spartacus's ideals apparent through his dialogue. Kubrick's
preference for a more visual conception of the character, combined with
his perhaps understandable desire to put some limits on Trumbo's
predilection for left wing polemics, produced a political film with
scarcely any politics in it. As one writer put it, Spartacus seems so
oblivious to the cause for which he is fighting, freedom, that when he
finally speaks up for it, the audience is almost surprised.The Film Builds to a Shattering Anti-Climax
"Nine Roman armies have been destroyed by Spartacus because they went
out to fight slaves. Unless I am able to persuade you that the enemy we
engage tomorrow is as formidable and skillful as any that you have met in
your entire military career ... then we too shall be defeated. And our
defeat will mean the fall of Rome.
Informing his officers that he has been diligently collecting
information about Spartacus since the outbreak of the slave revolt,
Crassus starts to recount what he knows of the life of the slave leader,
beginning with his years spent as a youth in the Libyan gold mines. The
scene then shifts to the mines and the film's story begins. Late in the
film, the action returns to the command tent as Crassus finishes his
account and dismisses his staff.The Props Are Knocked Out From Under the Film's Greatest
Performance
"I cannot find words to tell you my horror that Olivier's lines
relative to the slave women fighting alongside their men and dying in the
battle, and to the quality of love among slaves which is to him, such a
profound mystery, were not even shot.
As Spartacus is raised up on his cross:
Unfortunately, these lines turn human reality (and history) on their
heads. It was the terrible fear inspired by Spartacus when he was alive
that remained in the minds of his adversaries for generations after his
death. This emphasis on the moral, symbolic dimension of Spartacus's
challenge flows from the film's hidden message of nonresistance and
otherworldly resignation which is already apparent in the Prologue. There
it is asserted, against all historical evidence, that it was the rise of
Christianity (and not the continuation of the heroic struggle begun by
Spartacus) which was destined to overthrow the pagan tyranny of Rome.
Crassus: I want no grave, no marker for him. His body's to be
burnt and his ashes scattered in secret.
Caesar: Did you fear him Crassus?
Crassus: Not when I fought him. For I knew he could be beaten.
But now I fear him. Even more than I fear you.The Epic That Almost Was
References:
[1] Quoted in Martin M. Winkler, "Mythic and Cinematic Traditions in
Anthony Mann's El Cid," Mosaic, 26.3 (1993), pp. 89-111; esp pp.
102,104,108,109;
The author wishes to thank the following people for their help and
support in his research efforts. Without them this article could not have
been written. Bob Taylor of the Performing Arts Research Center at the
Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library; Jim Carleson of the
American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming: Martin Winkler,
Chairman of the Classics Department, George Mason University; Harry
Miller, Reference Archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater
Research, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; and especially David
Beyer, graduate research assistant at the Wisconsin Center, whose tireless
efforts unearthed virtually all the documents on which this article is
based. The author also wishes to gratefully acknowledge the continued
support and encouragement of his editor at Cineaste, Gary Crowdus, and to
thank his wife Rachael for putting up with eight months of listening to
his theories about Spartacus.
Copyright ©1996 Duncan L. Cooper, All Rights Reserved