Spartacus

I've got a box set of Kirk Douglas movies that has Spartacus in it. I'd been a bit reluctant to sit down and devote a good 196 minutes to the movie, sort of the same issue I had with Cleopatra a few weeks back. But Spartacus is going to be on TCM tomorrow (Mar. 12) at 4:30 PM, so I recently fired up the DVD player and finally watched Spartacus.

Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) is a slave of Thracian (roughly modern-day northern Greece) origin who at the start of the movie in the 70s BC is working in a mine in Libya, where the slave-masters drive everyone hard until they mostly die a fairly early death. Spartacus is unsurprisingly truclent about it, but there's not much way to resist when you're a slave. He's about to have a bit of luck, if you can call it that, in the form of slave trader Batiatus (Peter Ustinov). He looks at several of the slaves, and buys Spartacus.

However, it turns out that Batiatus runs a training school for gladiatorial combat, and intends to put Spartacus into combat with all the other slaves there, another occupation that has a fairly limited lifespan, since combat is generally to the death. But Spartacus is able to become romantically invoved with one of the females cooking and feeding the slaves, Varinia (Jean Simmons), to the point that she's going to become pregnant with his child. But the two of them are split up when Roman Senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) buys Varinia. And after Crassus wants to see some combat, Spartacus decides to revolt.

They're able to break out of the training school, but if you think about it, it's not going to be easy to evade detection in Italy. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to go north to Gaul, but that's a pretty long journey. Instead, Spartacus contracts with a group of pirates represented by Tigranes (Herbert Lom) to take the ever-increasing group of rebel ex-slaves by boat over to the Balkans, requiring them to head down to Brindisi in the heel of Italy.

The Romans, of course, are up in arms about what's going on, and politics intrudes on what the best course of action should be. Pompey has been fighting a war in Hispania and is brought back to pursue Spartacus' army from the direction of Sicily, while another legion will attack from Brindisi. This will force Spartacus to head back north toward Rome, where Crassus has his own troops, and political reasons for driving Spartacus toward his troops.

In the meantime, there's been quite a bit of political maneuvering going on in the Roman Senate. Crassus, as we have seen, has tried to grab power for himself by becoming the hero in putting down Spartacus' revolt. Gracchus (Charles Laughton), patriarch in an old patrician family, is horrified at this, as he sees this as the first step toward tyranny. (Of course, he was ultimately right, as it would be less than 50 years until Rome became an empire.) A young Julius Caesar (John Gavin) ultimately takes Crassus' side, which I suppose was instrumental in Caesar's eventual rise to power.

The Romans also don't get to live happily ever after. Crassus loses Varinia, who runs away and joins Spartacus' army, and Gracchus is declared an enemy of the state by Crassus because Gracchus is the one person who could still challenge Crassus' power. Crassus also loses his manservant, Antonius (Tony Curtis), a slave who runs off after coming to believe he's going to be made a sex-slave.

The life of Spartacus is the sort of material that would probably work well in a miniseries, assuming that you want to cover the political situation that affects how the Romans handle the rebellion. At 196 minuts, this movie version of Spartacus is a little long, mostly because the final battle in which Spartacus is defeated but not killed comes with a good 40 minutes left in the movie. There's a lot of political ends between Crassus and Gracchus that the writers want to clean up, and a Hollywood scene at the end that's supposed to leave the viewer hopeful.

The version of Spartacus in the box set I have is the 2015 restoration which, if I had a good enough home theater to watch it, would probably look pretty darn good, although not as good as the Blu-ray release.